News

PolyU Info Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes 2023

COMP will broaden the Master of Science (MSc) programme spectrum in the academic year 2023/24. In addition to the evergreen MSc in Information Technology (MScIT) programme and Hong Kong’s first MSc in Blockchain Technology (MScBT) programme, two new members specialising emerging technology trends are introduced: MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Computing (MScAIBD) and MSc in Metaverse Technology (MScMT). On 7 January 2023, our MSc scheme leader and programme leaders unveiled the latest application information and more details on the programme features, study pattern and admission criteria in the info seminar for Taught Postgraduate Programmes. The videos have been uploaded to our website that can be accessed from each programme’s introduction page. Prospective students must not miss this chance to take a closer look at these first-hand information.

IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) 2022

Hosted by COMP, IEEE TALE 2022 was successfully held between 4 to 7 December 2022 under the theme “Transforming Educational Technologies and Pedagogies for the Next Decade”. This hybrid conference received 200 registrations from local and overseas. On 5 December, Prof. WONG Kwok-yin, Vice President (Education) delivered a welcome speech in the Opening Ceremony of the conference. Dr Edmundo TOVAR, President of IEEE Education Society also virtually greeted the participants. Prof. LI Qing, and Dr Henry CHAN, General Co-Chair and Technical Programme Co-Chair respectively, then addressed the participants on behalf of the organising committee. A series of keynote presentations and parallel sessions were arranged throughout the conference period, and it was delightful to meet and interact with international peers face-to-face at PolyU.The keynote presentations were given by Prof. Harry LEWIS (Harvard University), Prof. Barbara OAKLEY (Oakland University) and Dr Jonathon RICHTER (Immersive Learning Research Network). The conference also included three workshops, two panels and an interdisciplinary postgraduate student forum.   TALE is one of the flagship Asia-Pacific conferences of the IEEE Education Society, one of the major education societies in the world. Celebrating IEEE TALE’s 10 anniversary, the conference was sponsorsed by the Croucher Foundation and co-organised with the IEEE Education Society.The conference caters to researchers and practitioners with an interest in engineering, technology, and integrated STEM education as well as those interested in the innovative use of digital technologies for learning, teaching, and assessment in any discipline. The organisation committee comprises colleagues from COMP and other universities (see the acknowledgement below).   Selected papers were presented by international conference participants through the following sessions: 1. Community Engagement, Service Learning and Learning for the Future 2. Computing & IT Education 3. Education Metaverse and Immersive Learning 4. Engineering Education 5. Hyflex and Online Teaching 6. Learning Analytics 7. Next-Stage Virtual Teaching 8. Open, Flexible & Distance Learning 9. Reform of Industrial Design Specialty for New Engineering Education 10. STEM Education 11. Technology-Enhanced Learning   Acknowledgement TALE Organising Committee: General Co-Chairs: Prof. Qing LI, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Prof. Susan LORD, University of San Diego Technical Programme Co-Chairs: Dr Henry CHAN, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Dr Leon LEI, University of Hong Kong and Prof. Minjuan WANG, San Diego State University Publication Chair: Dr Jeff TANG, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Publicity Co-Chairs: Dr KP MARK, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Dr Gary Wong, University of Hong Kong Local Arrangement Co-Chairs: Dr Kevin YUEN, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Dr Walter FUNG, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Postgraduate Student Forum Chair and Sponsorship Chair: Dr Amelia LI, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Webmaster: Dr Peter NG and Dr Godfrey HO, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Virtual Arrangement Chair: Ms Crystal LUO, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Secretary: Ms Christy AU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Treasurer: Ms Angie FAN, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Technical Manager: Mr Grandy FU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

COMP x CAA Academic-Industry Seminar Series – FinTech (Nov 2022)

On 23rd Nov 2022, the final seminar featuring “FinTech” (i.e. Financial Technology) in the Academic-Industry Seminar series ended on a high note. Dr Henry CHAN, our Associate Professor and Associate Head of Partnership and Collaboration, joined hands with Mr Darron SUN, the Vice Chairman of The Institute of Financial Technologists of Asia, to discuss the trend and development of FinTech, especially in the post-pandemic era, and beacon participants what kinds of skills and knowledge were necessary for FinTech professionals. Mr SUN first brought up the changes in the FinTech landscape under the new normal and new economy, followed by the outlook for the local market. He predicted that Big Data and AI, and Regtech, would burgeon in the short future. He believed that the “FinTech 2025” strategy is conducive to the talent market and urged participants to obtain a professional FinTech credential. In Dr CHAN’s talk, he introduced an ITF-funded PRP project entitled: “An Innovative Hybrid Intelligence Web System for the Hong Kong Stock Market”, an analytic system powered by the combination of human intelligence and machine intelligence. Various resources such as open-source natural language processing libraries, useful models and research methods were introduced by Dr CHAN, demonstrating how to analyse the Hong Kong stock market from different perspectives. Attended by more than 140 participants in this final seminar, the first series of the Academic-Industry Seminar series was concluded with great success. The seminar series aims to enhance the connection between COMP and alumni, encourage life-long learning, as well as foster possible collaboration between COMP and industry.

Prof. CAO Jiannong has been selected for the President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement 2021/22

PolyU recognises the distinguished accomplishments and contributions of staff members through the President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement. We are delighted to congratulate Prof. CAO Jiannong (Dean of Graduate School, Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in Data Science and Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing of COMP), for receiving this prestigious award in the category of Research and Scholarly Activities (Outstanding Researcher), in academic year 2021/22. This year, only six individual staff members and two teams school-wide, who have demonstrated unparalleled achievements, are crowned with this glory and honour. The award presentation ceremony will be held early next year. Prof. CAO is the director, co-director and/ or the founder of several research institutes, including Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Things (RIAIoT), Internet and Mobile Computing Lab (IMCL), University's Research Facility in Big Data Analytics (UBDA). He served as the department head from 2011 to 2017. Prof. CAO is currently member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of IEEE, a fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF), and an ACM distinguished member. His research interests include distributed systems and blockchain, wireless sensing and networking, big data and machine learning, and mobile cloud and edge computing. He published 5 co-authored and 9 co-edited books, and over 500 papers in major international journals and conference proceedings. He also obtained 16 patents. Back in 2009, The President’s Award for Excellent Performance/Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities 2008/09 was conferred on him as well.

COMP academics named Highly Cited Researchers 2022

Two academic members of our Department are named Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) in 2022, as announced by Clarivate. Since 2015, Prof. ZHANG Lei, Chair Professor of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, has been named HCR in the field of Engineering seven times. This demonstrates a lasting and significant influence on engineering. According to Clarivate, Prof. ZHANG’s research works have been cited more than 27,000 times in Web of Science and his H-index is 79. His research interests include image and video processing, computer vision, pattern recognition and biometrics, etc. Prof. GUO Song, our Professor, is one of the only three scholars in Hong Kong who are recognised as HCR in the field of Computer Science this year. He has contributed more than 540 publications in Web of Science and has generated remarkable impact in the field. His research interests are mainly in edge AI, big data and machine learning, mobile computing, and distributed systems. The 2022 list of HCR is released by Clarivate Plc, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation. The list focuses on contemporary research achievement: only highly cited papers in the sciences and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection™ during the 11-year period 2011 to 2021 were surveyed. Highly cited papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year.

Prof. GUO Song elected Member of Academia Europaea

Prof. GUO Song, Professor of our Department, has been elected as the Member of Academia Europaea under the Informatics Section in 2022. Prof. GUO’s research interests are mainly in edge AI, 6G, big data and machine learning, mobile computing, and distributed systems. His research has been sponsored by RGC, NSFC, ITF, MOST, NRC, JSPS, MIC, JST, industry, etc. He published many papers in top venues with wide impact in these areas and was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Web of Science). He is the recipient of the 2020 Best Paper Award for IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2019 IEEE TCBD Best Conference Paper Award, 2018 IEEE TCGCC Best Magazine Paper Award, 2019 & 2017 IEEE Systems Journal Annual Best Paper Award, and other 8 Best Paper Awards from IEEE/ACM conferences. He also received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities twice. The Academia Europaea was established in 1988 and is the Pan-European Academy of Sciences Humanities and Letters. Their members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research. Their membership invitations are made only after peer group nomination, scrutiny and confirmation as to the scholarship and eminence of the individual in their chosen field. Election is confirmed by the Council of the Academia. Congratulations to Prof. GUO.

Research Work by Dr Zheng Yuanqing and collaborators received the Test of Time Award in SenSys 2022

We are pleased to announce that the research work “IODetector: A Generic Service for Indoor Outdoor Detection” by our Associate Professor Dr ZHENG Yuanqing  and his collaborators (ZHOU Pengfei , LI Zhenjiang , LI Mo, and SHEN Guobin) published in ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2012 received the Test of Time Award in SenSys 2022 for “Contributions to intelligent mobile location services with enduring commercial adoption and successful widespread technology transfer”. ACM SenSys is the premier computer systems conference focused on the architecture, design, implementation, and performance of networked sensing systems, sensor-oriented data modelling and analytics, and sensor-enabled applications. The Test of Time Award recognizes research papers that are at least 10 years old and have had long-lasting academic, industrial and/or societal impact on networked embedded sensing system science and engineering. IODetector is the first smartphone based solution for indoor/outdoor detection, and also one of the pioneering research works in mobile sensing. IODetector has been successfully integrated in the business of on-demand food delivery service in over 300 cities in China, providing accurate status estimation for over 1 million food couriers which helps improve the delivery efficiency and increase the business profit. We believe the indoor/outdoor status could be an essential component of the infrastructure information to facilitate mobile applications and systems. Deployment experience and lessons learned are described in a recent experience paper “Experience: Adopting Indoor Outdoor Detection in On-demand Food Delivery Service” in MobiCom 2022.

COMP Capstone Project awarded First Runner-up in Final Year Project Competition 2022 held by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

To identify outstanding final year projects in the field of computational intelligence, Hong Kong Chapter of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society organised the 19th Final Year Project Competition in August 2022. Sweta Das, our recent graduate of BSc (Hons) in Computing, received the first runner-up award in the competition with her capstone project titled “Affective Awareness Agents in Virtual Reality”. The project aims to create an affective awareness agent, which can understand the user’s emotions from multiple input channels and make responses in support of VR. Analysis of speech or facial expressions alone usually depicts human emotions inaccurately. The awarded project addresses these limits and examines the emotions of users with both speech and facial recognition. The speech of the user is captured in the microphone, while the facial expressions of the lower mouth are captured through the facial tracker attached to the headset. In return for the inputs, an agent replies by lip synchronising the response to the user according to the emotion analysed. The project was inspired by a few successful research projects published in academia and industry. Dr LI Chen Richard, COMP Research Assistant Professor, is the supervisor of the project. “I am thankful to Dr Richard Li for his invaluable guidance and support throughout”, said Sweta.

First full-scale Undergraduate Info Day since the pandemic outbreak was completed with great success

The hybrid PolyU Undergraduate Info Day 2022 ended on 8 October, attracting more than 26,000 visitors to participate in this annual highlight at the PolyU campus and online platform. This year, COMP arranged interactive booth activities and consultation sessions, information seminars and laboratory tours with live demonstrations. The event was the first full-scale physical Info Day after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to travel restrictions, both the booth consultation and information seminar supported an online option. International students could enjoy equal opportunities to learn about our undergraduate programmes and get advice from our academic staff. At the physical booth, visitors had chance to meet and talk with our staff and students in person and taste Metaverse in the virtual treasure hunt activities. The information seminars covered the features of our BSc Scheme in Computing and AI, general admission requirements and the career path after graduation, which attracted more than 400 students and parents to attend. To enable visitors a peek inside the research and teaching facilities of COMP, guided laboratory tours at our Game Lab were arranged. More than 260 visitors joined the tours and experienced the Mixed Reality applications designed by our students. PolyU Undergraduate Info Day is an annual event which provides an excellent platform for prospective students, their parents and the public to obtain the most up-to-date information on a wide range of academic programmes and to gain valuable tips about planning for university life.

2022 One-week Online Engineering Summer Programme with Cambridge University (Girton College)

The One-week Online Engineering Summer Programme with Cambridge University (Girton College) was successfully held from 25 to 29 July 2022. The programme was co-organised by Girton College of the University of Cambridge and the Faculty of Engineering of PolyU. Fifteen COMP students joined the programme this year. The course “Maths for Engineering” was delivered by Dr John Longley, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Engineering from the University of Cambridge. Different areas in mathematics were covered in the course, including vector analysis, matrix algebra, numerical solutions and quadrature, introduction to engineering statistics, as well as data analysis for engineers, which could help to improve students’ calculation skills. The programme was also a window on study life at Girton College and the University of Cambridge. Students had the opportunity to glimpse the Cambridge experience and to connect with students on the other side of the world during discussion night and a walking tour. The cultural exchange inspired our students to further explore the United Kingdom in the future.