Achievements

Third Prize of the Best Student Presentation Award in International Conference on Optical and Photonic Engineering 2022

Our PhD student, Miss Zilan Pan, obtained the Third Prize of the Best Student Presentation Award in the International Conference on Optical and Photonic Engineering (icOpen) 2022 for the paper “Optical Transmission through Thick Biological Tissue using Optical Modulation”. Accurate data transmission is important in biological applications and biomedical devices. Realizing high-fidelity optical wireless transmission with a large penetration depth is desirable. Here, a sequence of amplitude-only patterns at the transmitter is considered as information carrier to encode the transmitted data. The total light intensity at the receiving end is collected and recorded by a bucket detector. Miss Pan’s research work verifies feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach with different thicknesses of a biological sample. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method based on zero-frequency modulation using low light intensity.

Prof. Gang Li and Dr Ruijie Ma have been named 2022 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics

Prof. Gang Li and his postdoctoral researcher, Dr Ruijie Ma, have been named 2022 Highly Cited Researchers by the Clarivate Analytics in 2022! They are acknowledged in the category of cross-field for their significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple highly cited papers over the last decade. 6938 researchers from 69 countries or regions and spread across a diverse range of research fields are recognized this year. They are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index. It is outstanding that Prof. Gang Li has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher for 9 consecutive years. Prof. Li’s research interests are organic semiconductor, and organo-metal halide hybrid perovskite based thin-film optoelectronic devices. He has published more than 180 papers with more than 70000 citations and an H-index of 82 on Google Scholar. While Dr Ruijie Ma’s research interest lies in organic solar cells (OSCs) with the focus on material exploitation and mechanism characterizations for reaching the performance limit of OSCs. He has published about 70 research papers with more than 3900 citations as well as an H-index of 34 on Google Scholar. Congratulations to Prof. Li and Dr Ma for their achievements!

Best Paper Award in the 16th International Conference on Provable and Practical Security 2022

Dr Wenjuan Li and her research collaborators from the Technical University of Denmark won the Best Paper Award in the 16th International Conference on Provable and Practical Security (ProvSec) 2022 for their paper "FolketID: A Decentralized Blockchain-based NemID Alternative against DDoS Attacks". ProvSec is an international conference on provable security in cryptography and practical security for information systems. Electronic Identity (eID) is a solution toward solving the identity problem when deploying e-Government. Such solution should not only be secure, but also have to be robust enough under adversarial conditions. In practice, eID often suffers from some security threats such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. NemID is a digital eID used to log into public websites in Denmark. Dr Li's research team developed FolketID, a blockchain-based NemID alternative against DDoS attacks. The DDoS mitigation is achieved by not only utilizing its powerful data distribution ability, but also exploiting the economy system in blockchain. It particularly takes use of the transaction fees to effectively prevent DDoS attacks. The results demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of FolketID in defeating DDoS attacks.

Outstanding Student Award in the IEEE International Conference on Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI’2022)

Supervised by Dr Ivan Ho, our MSc in EIE programme graduate, Miss Tingting Fan, obtained the Outstanding Student Award in the IEEE International Conference on Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI) 2022 for her research work on "Digital Twin-Assisted Lane-changing and Variable Speed Limit Control for Weaving Segments". In this work, a joint traffic and network simulator is established to construct the digital twin system, and two traffic control strategies, namely the lane-changing (LC) distribution strategy and the variable speed limit (VSL) control strategy, are proposed and validated in a complex highway weaving segment environment. The results show that communication packet loss negatively affects the performance of V2X-assisted LC control, which is usually neglected in the field of transport studies. However, by integrating the LC control with the proposed reinforcement learning based VSL control, we can improve the overall average speed of vehicles on highway weaving segments by more than 40% compared with the LC control alone.

Champion of Hack The Boo CTF Competition

Hack The Boo CTF Competition is a 5-day Catch-the-flag event organized by Hack The Box, a renowned global cybersecurity training platform which allows individuals, companies, universities and all kinds of organizations around the world to level up their hacking skills. This year, they organized a Halloween-themed CTF in the Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October 2022, which challenged contestants for a variety of categories of cybersecurity problems including Web Exploitation, Reverse Engineering, Forensics, and Compromise (also known as Pwn). Mr Hopkins Kong, coach of the PolyU CTF Team and MPhil student in the EIE Department, has led the team “NuttyShell” to win the championship among a total of 6367 players worldwide.

Prof. Changyuan Yu Elected 2023 Optica Fellow

We are pleased to share that Prof. Changyuan Yu has been elected a Fellow of Optica for 2023 for his significant contributions to signal processing in optical fiber communication and sensing systems, and actively serving the optics community! This distinction was awarded by the Optica, formerly known as The Optical Society (OSA), to 109 members from 24 countries, for their outstanding contributions to business, education, research, engineering, and service to Optica and the community. Optica is dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in optics and photonics worldwide. Fellow membership in Optica is limited to no more than ten percent of the membership and is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Congregations to Prof. Yu for his achievements!

Best Paper Award, the 22nd International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP’2022)

Dr Wenjuan Li and her research collaborators from the Aalborg University won the Best Paper Award in the 22nd International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP) 2022 for their paper "EnergyCIDN: Enhanced Energy-aware Challenge-based Collaborative Intrusion Detection in Internet of Things". ICA3PP is one of the most famous events of the world that covers the many dimensions of parallel algorithms and architectures, encompassing fundamental theoretical approaches, practical experimental projects, and commercial components and systems. Due to the structure, distributed intrusion detection may suffer from the insider threats, where a malicious node can share false information to influence the network performance. Dr Li's research team developed EnergyCIDN, an enhanced challenge-based collaborative intrusion detection network by adopting an energy-aware trust management model against advanced insider attacks. The proposed scheme can measure the reputation of an internal node by considering energy consumption, which is especially effective in an IoT environment. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach can be more robust against advanced insider attacks, compared with similar trust management schemes.

Best Paper Award in the International Workshop on Advanced Image Technology 2022

Prof. Kenneth Lam and our PhD student, Mr Jun Xiao, won the Best Paper Award in the International Workshop on Advanced Image Technology (IWAIT) 2022 for their paper “Multi-level Feature Aggregation Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging”. The International Workshop on Advanced Image Technology is a well-known international event that gathers researchers, professors, students and interested persons in the field of advanced image technology. Modern digital cameras typically cannot capture the whole range of illumination, due to the limited sensing capability of sensor devices. High dynamic range (HDR) imaging aims to generate images with a larger range of illumination by merging multiple low-dynamic range (LDR) images with different exposure times. However, when the images are captured in dynamic scenes, existing methods unavoidably produce undesirable artifacts and distorted content. In this paper, the research team proposed a multi-level feature aggregation network, based on the Laplacian pyramid, to address this issue for HDR imaging. The proposed method progressively aggregates non-overlapping frequency sub-bands at different pyramid levels, and generates the corresponding HDR image from coarser to finer scales. This method can significantly outperform other competitive HDR methods, thereby producing HDR images with high visual quality.

Best Student Paper Award in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing

Dr Liang Liu and his collaborators in the Chinese Academy of Sciences won the Best Student Paper Award in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) for their paper “Efficiently and Globally Solving Joint Beamforming and Compression Problem in the Cooperative Cellular Network Via Lagrangian Duality". ICASSP is the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s flagship conference on signal processing and its applications. Dr Liu’s research team considers the joint beamforming and quantization problem in the cooperative cellular network, where multiple relay-like base stations connected to the central processor via rate-limited fronthaul links cooperatively serve the users. In this paper, they first show that there is no duality gap between the considered problem and its Lagrangian dual by showing the tightness of the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of the considered problem. Then they propose an efficient algorithm based on Lagrangian duality for solving the considered problem. The proposed algorithm is highly efficient and is guaranteed to find the global solution of the problem.

Champion of the Tertiary Education Category in the Hong Kong Electronics Project Competition 2022

Supervised by Dr Ivan Ho, our MSc in Electronic and Information Engineering Programme student, Guo Jingtao, obtained the Champion of the Tertiary Education Category in the Hong Kong Electronics Project Competition 2022! The competition was organized by the Electronics Division of The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) with the theme of “Advancing Innovation and Technology in New Normal Smart City” this year. It aims to uplift the awareness and knowledge of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in Hong Kong, and to nurture engineers to apply innovative IoT technologies to improve the quality of life. The winning project “Channel State Information (CSI) based Self-quarantine Monitoring System” proposed a system to monitor people under self-quarantine using wireless sensing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The system is user-friendly and privacy-preserving without the use of any wearable devices. The prize presentation ceremony was held in the Hong Kong Electronics Symposium 2022 on 25 July 2022.