PolyU students leverage industry experience and shine at AI challenge

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly growing worldwide and is playing a critical role in technological advancement. To challenge themselves in using AI technologies to provide industry solutions, a team of PhD students from PolyU’s Department of Computing (COMP) applied their professional knowledge and internship experience in the first National Artificial Intelligence Challenge and won a First Class Award among over 3,000 teams from 13 countries and regions.

Themed around the application of artificial intelligence in the “video/vision” field, the Challenge was divided into two categories, namely “AI + 4K HDR” and “Person Re-ID”. The PolyU team consisting of Zeng Hui, Yang Xi and Liang Jie took part in the “AI + 4K HDR” category, exploring the performance of 4K high dynamic range (HDR) standard in terms of image resolution, details, color and dynamic range and designing practical solutions.

Prof. Zhang Lei, Chair Professor at COMP and the team’s supervisor, said that PolyU always encourages students to have exchanges with and learn from the industry. Members of the team have previously gained valuable internship experience at the Alibaba DAMO Academy’s Artificial Intelligence Center and Alibaba has also provided them with professional support during the competition, thus achieved impressive result in this event. PolyU and Alibaba have cooperated closely for many years, and also developed collaborative research in a variety of fields including artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and computer vision, etc. Several PolyU proposals were successfully selected for funding in the Alibaba Innovation Research Program (AIR) for several years. In 2018 PolyU and Alibaba Cloud signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen their cooperation in Artificial Intelligence research.