Date: 1 March 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Venue: KB213, KB Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus
Speaker: Cheng Ping Onn, Founder & CTO, Neruti Technology

The talk focused on how artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied now and playing an increasing role in transforming five major industries, which are Healthcare, Transportation, Education, Finance and the Workforce. The content of the talk was split into 80% business and 20% technical. 

Cheng Ping Onn is the founder and CTO of Neruti Technology Sdn Bhd. He holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has over 20 years of experience in information security, risk management and technology consulting in Malaysia and Singapore. 

Date: 1 March 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Venue: KB213, KB Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speaker: Loh Wei Hoong, Executive Director of Neruti Technology

This talk centered around the potential of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry and why we, as students, should be seriously looking into the AI industry as a career option.
Loh graduated with Master of Arts in Economics from Dalhousie University, Canada and also graduates Diploma in Marketing from Chartered Institute of Marketing. He is currently the Executive Director of Neruti Technology and part-time MBA lecturer in many universities in China and ASEAN. 

Date: 8 March 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM 
Venue: KB213, KB Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speaker: Chua Kah Keong, Lead R&D Engineer, Recogine Technology 

In this talk, we shared the challenges and limitations faced in conventional image processing based approaches, and how neural networks tackle these scenarios. There was further discussion on the obstacles of making more intelligent computers that could be capable in making human-like decisions. Kah Keong has years of experience in image processing and machine learning. He graduated from UTAR with a Bachelor Degree in IT and Computer Engineering and M. EngSc. He has several years of industry experience focusing on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Currently, he is one of the Research & Development core members at Recogine Technology, a leading company in Malaysia ITS sector. 

Date: 3rd May 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:00 - 3:00 PM 
Venue: KAG01, KA Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speaker: Professor Dr Markus Westner

Professor Dr Markus Westner,
Dean of Study Affairs and International Coordinator at
the Faculty of Computer Sciences at OTH Regensburg.

Professor Dr Markus Westner, presented his talk on the exchange opportunities for staff and students in general at OTH Regensburg and in particular in the Faculty of Computer Science. He gave an overview of his research activities in the field of Lean IT, Shadow IT, IT Nearshoring, and IT Outsourcing followed by a brief overview of other fields of research that are conducted by his colleagues in the faculty.

Prof. Dr. Markus Westner is professor in the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics at OTH Regensburg, a Technical University for Applied Sciences. As an academic and educator he specializes in IT-Performance-Management and Management Consulting. His main research interests are in IT-Strategy and IT-Sourcing. Furthermore, he is passionate about improving the learning opportunities of his students by applying innovative teaching didactics.

His doctoral thesis (German PhD equivalent) focused on success factors for implementing and managing IT offshoring projects. He also holds a Master of Computing degree from Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland (New Zealand), and a diploma in Business Administration (German MBA equivalent) with distinction from EBS University, Oestrich-Winkel (Germany). 

Markus is Associate Editor for Information & Management (I&M). Furthermore, he acted as reviewer for the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), HMD Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Information Systems Management (ISM), JITTA, and Organizacija.  He is Dean of Study Affairs, International Coordinator in the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, elected member of the Faculty Council and elected member of the University Senate.
Before he started his academic career he worked as a management consultant in a project manager position for Bain & Company, one of the world’s largest management consultancies, in their Munich office. In this position he advised clients from the financial services, telecommunications, and high tech sector regarding issues of strategy, organization, and performance improvement.

Date: 19 July 2017 (Wednesday) 
Time: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM 
Venue: KB300, KB Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speaker: Sian Lerk Lau, Engineering Manager, OnApp Ltd 

The talk entitled, DevOps: Myth or Real centres on the latest development in software development practices. Identifying the basic motivation behind DevOps practices and explores common toolchains used in the software development and delivery process.
Sian Lerk is a trained programmer, educationist at heart and engineering process enthusiast. He started his career with UTAR for 7 years before venturing into software development. He enjoys facilitating collaborative efforts between devs, ops and testers in solving tough design, infrastructure and programming puzzles in our daily operations. He is currently the Engineering Manager for the CDN division in OnApp Ltd.

Date: 12 July 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Venue: KB300, KB Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speakers: Ken Low, Founder, Taessina PLT; and
Alvin Then, Founder & CTO, Taessina PLT.

In the world of software engineering, there are teams of people working together to achieve the end result. From developers, designers, project managers and clients, a seemless workflow must be achieved to ensure a sound product. The key is a strong and efficient communication flow from all groups that consists of many individuals of different backgrounds. Continuos and correct communication ensures that all groups are on the same page while going through the software development phase, and will have the same expectation on the output of the projects. This talk is a sharing session on the flow of communication during software development - from the very early stage of requirement gathering to the deployment of the software.

Left picture: Ken Low. Right pricture: Alvin Then
Ken Low is the founder of Taessina PLT. He is passionate about technologies and is looking to improve the quality of life of the community. He likes to share knowledge and experiences with the people around. Alvin Then is the Founder & CTO of Taessina PLT. He is a Full stack developer and like Ken is passionate about giving back to the community by mentoring.

Date: 27 July 2017 (Thursday) 
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM 
Venue: KAG01, KA Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speakers: Reza Razali (CEO and founder of Terato Inc)

Reza started coding at age seven, began reading Fortune and Forbes at twelve, co-founded the widely popular Malaysian teen portal terato.com at the age of seventeen, started terato at twenty-five and grew it from two to a forty-man operation. A well-known figure in the Malaysian tech industry, Reza also invest in other Malaysian start-ups. Some of Terato's well known clients are CIMB (CIMB Clicks), AXIATA and Maybank.

Date: 16 August 2017 (Wednesday) 
Time: 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM 
Venue: KAG03, KA Block, UTAR Sungai Long Campus.
Speakers: Michael Lai, Group Director, GoSMAC Sdn. Bhd.

Date: 15 November 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Venue: MoneyLion Office, Q Sentral, Unit 27-16
Speaker: Dr. Tay Yong Haur

Date: 12 December 2017 (Tuesday)
Time: 9:00 am
Venue: N108, UTAR Kampar Campus, Perak
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Hsueh-Ming Hang, NCTU

The DCT-based transform coding technique was adopted by the international standards (ISO JPEG, ITU H.261/264/265, ISO MPEG-2/4/H, and many others) for 30 years.
Although researchers are still trying to improve its efficiency by fine-tuning its components and parameters, the basic structure has not changed in the past 20 years. Researchers tried other methods such as wavelet coding and compressive sensing but they cannot show significant improvement over the existing DCT-coding system.
The deep learning schemes recently developed may provide a new direction for constructing a high-compression image/video coding system. The basic ideas are the Generative Model and Autoencoder in the deep learning neural network. Up to now, only a dozen or so papers have been published on this subject in the past two years and the recent results indicate that the potential of compression efficiency offered by this new methodology could be very significant. In this talk, we summarize the basic designs and the progress of this topic so far, and our on-going activity along this direction.

Date: 11 December 2017 (Monday)
Time: 2:00 pm
Venue: N108, UTAR Kampar Campus, Perak
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Hsueh-Ming Hang, NCTU

Prof. Dr. Hsueh-Ming Hang delivered a second tlk this time entitled RGB-D Video Acquisition and Synthesis. The focus of next-generation 3D research is on the so-called virtual-viewpoint (or free-viewpoint) video system. It is also an on-going standardization item in the international ITU/MPEG Standards. Typically, a densely arranged camera array is used to acquire input images and a number of virtual view pictures are synthesized at the receiver using the depth-image based rendering (DIBR) technique.
In this talk, we focused on two essential components in a virtual-view system: RGB-D video acquisition and view synthesis. Recent devices such as Microsoft Kinect offer an inexpensive hardware solution to the RGB-D video acquisition. However, its depth map quality needs to be improved.
We used four (2 by 2) Kinects to capture video and synthesize a virtual-view video in-between. In addition to depth map improvement, we developed a multiple view blending algorithm, which decides the best view(s) used to generate the synthesized image pixel by pixel. Another challenge is the complexity of view-synthesis procedure. In the second part of this talk, we described a few techniques to reduce computational complexity and used a parallel processing structure, NVIDIA CUDA, to implement the view synthesis task. With the aid of GPU, we can speed up in the view synthesis process significantly.