News

Cybersecurity seminar for undergraduates

To equip our undergraduate students with the knowledge and skills in cybersecurity and assist them in planning their pathways for further studies or career development in the field, COMP hosted an online seminar “How to be a competent cybersecurity researcher and practitioner?” on 2 August 2021. Cybersecurity has become one of the issues that arouse public concern, along with the rise in popularity of financial technologies and related applications, e.g., virtual banking and digital identity. Cybersecurity threats keep evolving, mutating, and occurring in different circumstances. The research community is constantly exploring these vulnerabilities, proposing new models and protocols to fulfil the security requirements of these applications. Dr Daniel Luo, our Associate Professor, and Dr Dennis Liu, our Teaching Fellow, shared with the participants the research on smart contract analysis by addressing the research questions in detail and illustrating concrete research examples. Dr Luo also talked about smart contract security from the practitioners’ perspectives and offered professional advice for the better implementation of smart contracts in blockchain applications. The seminar enabled students to understand the process of doing research on cybersecurity as well as various channels and resources to explore new knowledge.

Blockchain technology training programme for OGCIO

COMP and PolyU’s Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship Office (KTEO) jointly organised a training programme on blockchain technology for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) from June 2019 to May 2021. Dr Daniel Luo, our Associate Professor and Dr Dennis Liu, our Teaching Fellow were two of the workshop trainers. Over 1,500 trainees were benefited from this two-year programme. The blockchain training programme included a series of one-day core classes and two-day advanced courses, targeting all analysts and programmers of OGCIO. We held 24 sessions of the introductory class and five sessions of hands-on training in total. The one-day class provided the participants with an overview of technological development and market trends of blockchain technology, as well as good practices for planning and managing blockchain projects. The trainers introduced the basic concept and growth of blockchain in today’s environment and context and shared some local and global real cases from the private and public sectors. To encourage the trainees to think further and explore possibilities in applying the knowledge to their work, trainers conducted a group discussion and the class voted for the most innovative idea. The two-day training focused on the technical hands-on exercises with various real-world case studies and other interesting examples to deepen trainees knowledge and extend their skills in blockchain technology. They learnt not only about the architecture of blockchain networks but were also taught to develop blockchain applications using Hyperledger Fabric. Overall, the participants understood the importance and value of blockchain technology and they became aware of incorporating blockchain into their future project planning.

COMP undergraduate won First Prize in the COMPSAC’s first Annual Student OER Contest

The IEEE Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) organised its first Annual Student Open Educational Resources (OER) Contest and Alex Zhang Caiqi, (BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 3) won the First Prize with his OER work titled “Learning Computing by Card Magic”. OERs are publicly available web-accessible entities that can be used for teaching and learning. Many instructors around the world use OERs to supplement their teaching. ‘’Learning Computing by Card Magic’’ is a practical video tutorial created by Alex that aims at teaching basic computing knowledge by playing card magic. To arouse the interest of the audience, Alex first shows a card trick followed by an explanation of the underlying coding concepts. A simple program is formulated at the end to simulate the magic procedure. It helps to improve students’ programming skills and consolidate their understanding of the related theories by using “magic” as an innovative and attractive medium in the OER. “I really appreciate my supervisor, Dr Henry Chan, who gave me so many precious suggestions about my work and recommended me to join the contest,” Alex said. He is considering developing the magic computing tutorial into a series, illustrating other computing knowledge such as the conversion between decimal numbers and binary numbers, and common data structures, with more examples.

Dr Daniel Luo received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2021

We are pleased to announce that Dr Daniel Luo, Associate Professor of COMP, together with his PhD student, Xian Zhan, and other researchers recently received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021) with the paper titled “ATVHunter: Reliable Version Detection of Third-Party Libraries for Vulnerability Identification in Android Applications”. Since third-party libraries (TPLs) have been widely used in mobile apps, accurate detection of TPLs in Android apps is essential to many security and software maintenance tasks, such as repackaged apps identification, vulnerability discovery, etc. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to identify TPLs accurately due to the challenges like TPL dependency, code obfuscation, and diverse versions. In this paper, the research team proposed and developed a novel system named ATVHunter, which can pinpoint the precise vulnerable in-app TPL versions and provide detailed information about the vulnerabilities and TPLs. Extensive experimental results showed that ATVHunter outperforms state-of-the-art TPL detection tools in terms of accuracy and efficiency. To investigate the ecosystem of the vulnerable TPLs used by apps, the research team constructed a comprehensive vulnerable TPL dataset and used ATVHunter to conduct a large-scale analysis on the apps from Google Play store. ATVHunter found 9,050 apps including vulnerable TPL versions with 53,337 vulnerabilities and 7,480 security bugs, most of which have high risks and were not recognised by app developers. This result uncovered severe security issues in mobile apps and is very important to mobile app developers, users and security researchers. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is the premier software engineering conference. Since 1975, ICSE has provided a forum where researchers, practitioners, and educators gather together to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and issues in the field of software engineering.

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition at PolyU

The Faculty of Engineering (FENG) of PolyU held its first Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT®) on 18 June, challenging the research students nominated by their affiliated departments in FENG to present their research theses within three minutes. COMP’s representative, Hou Ningning, won the ‘People’s Choice Award’ with her thesis titled “‘LoRa, can I trust you?’ Security threats and countermeasures in IoT”. The award was voted by the audience online after all students’ presentation. The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing human lives. More and more daily objects are connected to the Internet, making them become smarter and offer better services. However, as with many technologies, there are questions of its future and implications on society, especially IoT security. IoT devices are usually embedded devices that have limited resources for security, and traditional security solutions will not run on these devices. Therefore, the communication security of IoT devices will be a big problem in the future. Ningning’s thesis focuses on security problems in IoT, LoRa security, in particular. LoRa is a promising IoT communication technology that can transmit up to 3 km in an urban environment, while other IoT tech like WiFi and Bluetooth can only transmit no more than 50 metres. As such, LoRa is suitable for wide-area communication. In the research, Ningning investigates the potential security threats of LoRa and proposes the corresponding countermeasures against such attacks. “Today, organisations usually deploy IoT with security and privacy as an afterthought. I hope my research can raise the awareness of the government, industry as well as end-users,” Ningning said. “I would like to thank all my friends and my supervisor for helping me prepare for this competition. My sincere thanks also go to all the audience who vote for me.” Developed by the University of Queensland, Australia, 3MT® cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills, as well as supports their capacity to effectively explain their research and its significance in three minutes, in a language appropriate to non-specialist audiences. 3MT® is now a globally recognised competition that has been held in over 900 universities across more than 80 countries worldwide. PolyU is one of the participating universities this year.

COMP undergraduate shined in the Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards 2020

Declan Leung Chun-hin (BSc (Hons) in Enterprise Information Systems, Year 4) teamed up with another PolyU student from the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences to join the Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards 2020 and finally won the Silver Award and Best Business Potential Award with their project “Smart Bracelet”. Hong Kong is transitioning slowly into an ageing populated society. Every elderly (aged 65+) is currently supported by 3.5 working adults but this number is expected to decrease to less than 2 by 2030. It is estimated that 25% of the elderly people fall more than once in a year while a timely response within the first two hours is highly important for them as it increases their survival rate beyond one year by up to 35%. However, fewer caregivers resulted from a lower birth rate and more elderly choosing to live independently cause a rise in elderly fall which becomes one of the stress factors for the caregivers and society as a whole. “We are excited to turn our innovative idea into a gerontech product that assists the daily life of the elderly,” Declan shared. “We hope that both the well-being of the elderly can be enhanced and the burden of caregivers can be relieved.” The Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards aims at encouraging tertiary students in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to solve problems relating to infrastructure, technology and social development in the city through an engineering approach. This year over 70 teams participated in the competition under the theme of “Engineers for a Smart Future”.

Prof. Song Guo named the Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering

We are proud to announce that Prof. Song Guo, Professor and Associate Head (Research & Development) of COMP, was recently named Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), the national institution of Canada that comprises its most accomplished engineers who have expressed their dedication to the application of science and engineering principles. Fellows of CAE are nominated and elected by their peers. In view of their outstanding contributions to engineering, and for the service as role models in their fields and to their communities, a total of 52 new Fellows from all over the world were elected into the Academy this year. Prof. Guo is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member and a Highly Cited Researcher 2020. With over 500 papers published in major conferences and journals, Prof. Guo’s work in cloud computing, edge artificial intelligence, big data and distributed systems has had a broad and seminal impact – from the advancement of scientific knowledge to industrial innovation. He has been widely recognised for his pioneering contributions to the resilient management system used in post-disaster applications. Congratulations to Prof. Guo on attaining this honour.

COMP Best Project Award Competition 2021

To recognise students’ outstanding performance in their Capstone Projects, COMP hosted the online Best Project Award Competition on 5 June. Among this year’s projects, five students were shortlisted to compete for the awards. Apart from our faculty members, we invited experienced executives from the technology sector including Hong Kong Cyberport, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, and InfoTech Services to form a panel of judges. Each student was given fifteen minutes for presentation and Q&A. The judging criteria included project background study, design or methodology, implementation, evaluation, video demonstration and presentation skills. The panel agreed that it was a tough decision as all participants were very well-prepared and able to demonstrate their ideas concisely and respond confidently. In addition to the Best Project Awards, two contestants were selected to receive the InfoTech Job Market Driven Scholarship, based on the quality and relevancy of their projects in adopting hot skills highly sought by the IT industry. This annual competition not only gives an opportunity for the students to showcase their excellent work but also allows them to interact with industry professionals and gain direct insights to further refine their projects.

COMP research student received a Silver Prize at the Huawei Logistics Competition

To promote research and application on real-world problems related to Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO) such as Vehicle Routing and Bin Packing, Huawei Technologies organized a “Logistics Competition” at the 11th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO 2021). The competition attracted over 485 participants to compete in two tracks with real business scenarios generated by Huawei. Mr Han Zhang, our research student, received a Silver Prize of Track 1 in the competition with his project titled “Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems in Smart Logistics Based on Meta-heuristic Algorithms” under the supervision of Prof. Qing Li, our Chair Professor and Head. In the real-world logistics and supply chain management systems, many combinatorial optimization problems occur and the number of solutions increases exponentially with the scale of the problems. In this project, some common problems in smart logistics including facility location problem (FLP), capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), pickup and delivery problem (PDP), and three-dimensional container loading problem (3D-CL) were expected to be formulated as the combinatorial optimization problems which could be solved effectively and efficiently by the meta-heuristic algorithms. “Prof. Qing Li is very nice and patient and he gives me very useful guidance about how to do research, as well as how to analyze and solve problems step by step. Under his supervision, I enjoy the research journey very much,” Han shared. Being one of the top three winners, Han was also invited to give a spot-light talk at EMO 2021.

COMP undergraduate won a Champion Award at the HKGCC Business Case Competition 2020

Congratulations to our undergraduate, Mr Romeo Ng, and his team members on winning the Champion Award at the Business Case Competition 2020 organised by the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC). A total of 900 tertiary students in Hong Kong submitted proposals to crack the real-life business cases developed by five Chamber member companies including Citibank, Great Eagle Group, NEC, NWS Holdings Limited and Sino Group. Romeo teamed up with four other university students of diverse disciplines to join the “Sino Group” track. Under the theme of “Wellness Living for the Community”, the team had to figure out how the real estate industry could shape a positive environment that keeps the community happy, healthy and safe with the use of technology. With increasing attention on human well-being under COVID-19, the team proposed a residential project named “The Halcyon” which aimed to cultivate a sustainable lifestyle and culture that promoting both the physical and mental wellness of the residents, as well as helping them to build genuine connections within the neighbourhood through Property Technology (PropTech). Leveraging the IoT devices and beacons, the team designed a mobile app that provided different essential analysis and AI-driven automation for the residents. They also introduced various countermeasures to minimize the risks and concerns towards PropTech, preventing discomfort from the end-users and increasing their acceptance. Romeo’s team ultimately won the Champion of the track with their outstanding performance in the areas of innovativeness, feasibility, impact and presentation skills. “Winning the HKGCC Business Case Competition has been an exciting and remarkable experience for me,” said Romeo. “As a COMP student, I did feel the challenge of competing with other business-major students. A case competition like this was a rare opportunity for me to get out of my comfort zone and had a glimpse of the business world”.