R & D ANNUAL REPORT 2016

The talk was given by Prof. Shervin Shirmohammadi who is currently a Professor from the University of Ottawa, Canada. His research area includes multimedia systems and networks, specifically video systems, gaming systems, and multimedia-assisted health care systems. His research results have led to close to 300 publications, over 50 researchers trained at the postdoctoral and postgraduate levels, over 20 patents and technology transfer to the private sector, and a number of awards.

In the talk, Prof. Shervin reviewed the trends of modern video systems: the growing of video traffic on the Internet, modern types of video instead of the traditional single-viewed 2D video, and the access of videos not with the traditional computers but with mobile devices such as the smartphone or tablets. This has created hard challenges because of battery limitations, wireless access mode and their different display and size characteristics. Prof Shervin also presented specific examples and solutions to the research challenge that covers a wide range of systems, including the HD Video Conferencing, 3D/multimedia video, video-on-demand, cloud gaming, mobile gaming, and mobile video.

Biologists have been generating large amounts of genomic data from the genetic materials stored in a nuclear space of just a couple of micrometers. In the talk, Dr Mun-Kit Choy discussed on how to generate these data and how we can interpret and use them. Dr. Choy is currently a research fellow in Cardiovascular Genomics, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Manchester, UK. He is also one of the International Collaborative Partner (ICP) of UTAR Global Research Work for FICT. He is currently working on the mechanistic insights into the genetic variants associated with congenital heart disease.  

Prof. Lin Ying-Dar is a distinguished Professor of Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan. He is an IEEE fellow (Class of 2013) and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2014-2017). His research interests include quality of services, network security, deep packet inspection, wireless communications, and recently software defined networking.

The talk is divided into two sessions. In the first session, Prof. Lin shared his experiences in international academic services and research. During the talk, he encouraged researchers to volunteer for international academic services after years of research. These services and co-work experiences could in-turn inspire and elevate one’s future research. In the second session, Prof. Lin gave a lecture on network cloudification – turning communications into computing. He discussed the why, when, and where Software Defined Networking (SDN) would prevail. He also introduced the key technology components to make them happen, and reviewed the issues on standardisation, development, deployment and research. 

CISST and FICT has successfully organized the FICT Colloquium (May 2016) on 26th May 2016. This activity provides a chance to all postgraduate students (both Master and PhD students) in FICT to present their recent work or findings in their field of research. The Colloquium serves as a platform for postgraduate students of FICT to exchange ideas and gather feedbacks on their research progresses and findings.  Through this interaction, students will gain exposure on different fields of research undertaken by students in the faculty. It also serves as a platform for the supervisors and evaluators to gauge the performance of postgraduate students before submitting the research progress report.

The May FICT Colloquium had a total of 14 postgraduate presentations, grouped into 4 sessions, namely Graphic Processing & Computer Vision (1) & (2), Network Routing and Hardware Integration, and Algorithm and Artificial Intelligence. Each student delivered a 15-to-20-minute presentation, followed by 5 to 10 minutes of Q&A.

Date:10 August, 2016
Time: 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Event Type: Talk
Venue: N110, Block N, FICT, UTAR (Kampar Campus)
Speaker: Dr. Lin Chih-Yang

Dr. Lin Chih-Yang is currently an Associate Professor at Asia University, Taiwan. He is the author or co-author of over 90 papers and five patents. In the talk, Dr Lin introduced various applications of computer vision and shared his extensive experience in the field. Starting from the traditional application such as face recognition and moving object detection, Dr Lin then explained on more advanced applications such as the rehabilitation systems and auxiliary safe driving system design. Finally, he shared his experience in using computer vision techniques to help patients with scoliosis based on 3D modelling and 3D printing.

The talk was given by Dr. Jeffrey Tan, who is currently a Project Assistant Professor at Univerity of Tokyo, Japan. He is a local (Japan) and international committee member of RoboCup@Home League. He is currently heading the “RoboCup@HomeEducation”, a worldwide initiative to make robot building possible for everyone. In the talk, Dr Jeffrey Tan shared his 15 years of experience in robotics research.

He also shared his interests to expand the robotics research into human daily life application, which ultimately result in the “Personal Robot”. He expressed his hope to make personal robot available in every household through organising more educational activities.

Body Area Network (BAN) is formally defined as a communication standard optimised for low power devices and operated on, in or around the human body. In the talk, Dr Robithoh Annur explained that the advancement in wireless networks and the miniaturization of electrical devices have allowed communication between ultra-small and ultra-low-power intelligent sensors/ devices that are located on the body surface or implanted inside the body. An example of its application is the remote healthcare system where a greater physical mobility of the patient is permitted.
She also shared on the challenges faced to realise the wireless BAN. Dr Robithoh is an Assistant Professor at UTAR. Her research interests include medium access control design, wireless BAN and channel coding.

The workshop was completed successfully. It was attended by a total of 13 participants, including 6 undergraduate students. On the first day, the participants were given a simple introduction to GPU Computing. They learn how to set up the programming environment and write their first Hello World program, and use shared memories in GPU. On the second day, participants were challenged to more advanced GPU programming techniques such as warp shuffle and asynchronous copy and execution. Participants were also introduced to some GPU libraries to perform mathematical computation. Through the workshop, the participants can now use GPU in their coding.

Figure 1: Group Photo of the instructor with the participants of the workshop

Figure 2: The instructor, Mr. Lee Wai Kong, giving instructions during the workshop

Figure 3: The participants hard at work in the workshop

CISST and FICT have organized the second FICT Colloquium of the year on 8th December, 2016. In this colloquium, all postgraduate students (both Master and PhD students) presented their recent work or findings in their field of research.

This activity provides a chance to all postgraduate students of FICT to exchange ideas and gather feedback on their research progress and findings. Through this interaction, students will gain exposure on different fields of research undertaken by students in the faculty. It also serves as a platform for supervisors and evaluators to gauge the performance of postgraduate students before submitting the research progress report.

The December FICT Colloquium has two parallel tracks. There were a total of 15 postgraduate presentations, grouped into 5 sessions, namely Algorithms and Modeling, Graphics, Image Processing & Computer Vision (1) & (2), Information Systems and Software Engineering, and Network Routing and Hardware Integration. Each student delivered a 15-to-20-minute presentation, followed by 10 to 15 minutes of Q&A.

Speaker: Dr. Ramesh Kumar Ayyasamy

The talk was given by Dr. Ramesh Kumar Ayyasamy, who is an Assistant Professor at UTAR. His research interests include artificial intelligence, fuzzy clustering, fuzzy logic, knowledge representation, medical health informatics, text classification and text information indexing & retrieval. In the talk, Dr. Ramesh shared his research which aimed to develop physiotherapeutic game to improve elderly physiotherapy. Elderly physiotherapy using virtual gaming environment promotes active exercises in the form of games which helps elderly to enjoy their physiotherapy sessions. Dr. Ramesh also highlighted that monitoring and assessment are vital features to be embedded into the therapeutic-learning gaming platform.