News

Global Game Jam 2022

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) 2022 was held virtually from 20 to 30 January, attracting over 26,000 jammers from 680 jam sites in 10 countries. This year, the GGJ Hong Kong site was co-organised by Cyberport and COMP, which was the 11th biggest among all jam sites worldwide, with 241 jammers from students to professional game designers who created 59 games remotely. The best teams in nine different categories were awarded. Amongst them, two COMP teams received the Best Engagement Game and Best AR Game respectively. Mr Wu Chun-Hung, (BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 4) teamed up with Mr Zachary Sin (COMP PhD Student) and two staff of COMP to design and develop the game “Human Nature” within a week. They finally won the Best Engagement Game award. Responding to the continued environmental crisis, “Human Nature” is themed on the duality of human and nature. To take charge of the universal development of humanity, players need to reduce pollution and balance the needs of humans and that of the planet. They could learn about the environmental and economic impacts and how to avoid global disasters when acquiring different resources. On the other hand, three COMP undergraduates, including Mr Benedict Nicholas, Mr Coa Michael and Mr Hadi Nelsen (All from BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 3), together with a schoolmate from the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, won the Best AR Game award with their controllable AR game “Mono”. This game runs through a fairy tale full of philosophical sayings in a simple and smooth art style. In the game, white squares in bright light are separated from opposite black shadows. Players need to build blocks in a way that matches the given puzzle projection. The team used Unity along with the Vuforia and Dotween package libraries to make the game compatible with AR. Under the global theme of the word “Duality”, the teams formed by local participants were required to complete the full game development cycle from ideation to testing, including programming, art, game, sound and user interface design and testing in the time span of 240 hours. GGJ is the world's largest game jam event taking place around the globe, typically at physical locations, providing a creative platform for talented individuals to contribute to game development. It encourages participants to foster new friendships, increase their confidence and boosts opportunities within the community.

PolyU Outstanding Students Award Scheme 2021

We are glad to announce that our final year student, Mr Zhang Caiqi, (BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 4), has been awarded the “Outstanding Student Award of Faculty” and “Outstanding Student Award of Department” for his excellent academic performance, active involvement in extra-curricular activities and exemplary personal qualities. This year, a total of 26 students were selected as outstanding students at the departmental level while eight outstanding students were recognised at the faculty/ school level. Caiqi is an all-round student who has exceptional accomplishments in both academic and non-academic pursuits. He has received the Dean's Honours List in 3 consecutive years and numerous competitive scholarships throughout his study at PolyU COMP. Caiqi also got the opportunities to further explore overseas by conducting research at UCLA and Cambridge. Apart from study and research, Caiqi enthusiastically participated in co-curricular activities such as competitions and volunteer services. He is currently the third debater in the University’s mandarin debate team and the PolyU Student Ambassador. He also spares no effort to support community services by providing voluntary teaching services in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam and participating in local voluntary work that helped the elderly. The Outstanding Students Award (OSA) Scheme is one of the most prestigious award schemes at PolyU which is set up to award full-time final-year students who excel in both academic and non-academic pursuits as well as recognise high achievers. Congratulations to Mr Zhang Caiqi on receiving the honour!

Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU COMP 2022

The year 2022 marks the 85th Anniversary of PolyU, and in celebration of this important milestone, the University has introduced the Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award (OPAA) to publicly recognise our distinguished alumni’s diverse accomplishments and contributions to the community and their alma mater. OPAA was conducted at three levels: Department level, Faculty/School level and University level with 4 achievement categories, namely “Professional Achievement”, “Entrepreneurial Achievement”, “Scholarly Achievement”, and “Community Service Achievement”. We are glad to announce that Mr Andy Wan, Head of Transformation & Delivery, Chief Operating and Information Office of AXA Hong Kong and Macau, is the recipient of the Outstanding Alumni Award in “Professional Achievement” of PolyU Department of Computing. Andy received a Higher Diploma in Information Systems in 2000 and a Bachelor’s Degree in Computing four years later, both from PolyU. Building his career from the ground up as an IT programmer, Andy has worked in two different Global Fortune 500 multi-national insurance companies. He has been dedicated to the wealth management and financial services industry for 20 years, with extensive experience across various domains, such as technology, operation, distribution, project management, digital and business transformation for the local and regional offices. Being a passionate leader with a strong inner drive, Andy’s distinguished achievements, exemplary leadership and professionalism have helped him gain a high reputation from the industry. Apart from the active participation in our alumni activities, Andy also provided great support to the Department and PolyU, particularly in the COMP Mentorship Programme, in which he has served as the Mentor since 2020. Moreover, in the career talk, ‘Preparing to build a Professional Journey’, Andy shared his professional knowledge, leadership mindset and career journey with our students. Under the rigorous assessment and review of candidates’ qualifications and performance done by the judging panel, the award selection is based on candidates’ achievements in the field and their contributions to the community as well as PolyU. For COMP previous alumni award, please find the details here. Congratulations to Mr Andy Wan on receiving the Outstanding Alumni Award of the PolyU Department of Computing!

COMP x CAA Academic-Industry Seminar Series – Blockchain (Feb 2022)

Following the first seminar of the "COMP x CAA Academic-Industry Seminar Series" last October, the second seminar themed on “Blockchain” was held virtually on 16 February. More than one hundred students and alumni participated in the session. The seminar series is co-organised by COMP and the Computing Alumni Association (CAA). Blockchain technology can be extensively applied in many areas, from cryptocurrency, trading, NFT (Non-Fungible Token) to Metaverse. The blockchain system requires the mining process to generate new blocks, sustaining immutable transactions and data streams, yet there is the risk to be attacked. In particular, NFT has rapidly become one of the hot topics globally. In the seminar, Dr Henry Chan, Associate Professor and Associate Head (Partnership & Collaboration) of COMP, delivered welcome remarks to the audience. Mr Darron Sun, President of CAA and Head of Information Technology of Hong Kong Housing Society, also gave a warm welcome. Prof. Bin Xiao, COMP Professor, then presented possible security attacks on blockchain systems, including mining attacks. He further talked about power adjusting withholding and Bribery Selfish Mining. On the other hand, Mr Dick Fong, Venture Leader of McKinsey & Company, at the same time an alumnus from COMP, represented CAA to be the second invited speaker to give an overview on NFTs and their latest development by illustrating various examples. He also generously shared his knowledge related to the blockchain with the audiences. There were in-depth discussions and fruitful interaction between the speakers and the participants during the Q&A session. To encourage lifelong learning, strengthen the connection between COMP and Alumni, as well as foster the possible collaboration between academia and industry, COMP and CAA kicked off the “COMP x CAA Academic-Industry Seminar Series” in the academic year of 2021/22. Various academics and industry professionals will be invited to share their insights and experiences on important computing topics.

Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award 2020

We are proud to announce that our Professors, Prof. Song Guo, Prof. Wenjie Li and Prof. Bin Xiao, recently received the Faculty of Engineering (FENG) Research Grant Achievement Award for 2020 in recognition of their great efforts and contributions in securing external competitive research grants. Prof. Guo’s research interests are mainly in the areas of Big Data, Edge AI, Mobile Computing, and Distributed Systems. Prof. Li focuses on the research areas of Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, Social Media Analysis, Information Retrieval, Extraction and Summarization. Prof. Xiao conducts research on AI and Network Security, Data Privacy, Learning Model Security and Blockchain Systems development. All of them have led and participated in a number of multidisciplinary research projects in recent years. The Faculty Research Committee has set up FENG Research Grant Achievement Award since 2003 to recognise the outstanding performance of FENG academic staff members in securing external competitive research grants. To be qualified, a staff member must successfully secure three external competitive research grants in 36 months or four external competitive research grants in 60 months, as Principal Investigator/ co-Principal Investigator.

Prof. Guo received the Best Paper Award

Congratulations to our Professor, Prof. Song Guo, on receiving the 2020 Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Computers by the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board with his paper titled “A Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Offloading Game in Edge Computing”. Edge computing is a new paradigm to provide strong computing capability at the edge of pervasive radio access networks close to users. A critical research challenge of edge computing is to design an efficient offloading strategy to decide which tasks can be offloaded to edge servers with limited resources. Although many research efforts attempt to address this challenge, they need centralized control, which is not practical because users are rational individuals with interests to maximize their benefits. In this article, the design of a decentralized algorithm for computation offloading is studied, so that users can independently choose their offloading decisions. Game theory has been applied in algorithm design. Different from existing work, the challenge that users may refuse to expose their information about network bandwidth and preference is addressed. Prof. Guo is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member and a Highly Cited Researcher in the Computer Science category for 2 consecutive years since 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.

Prof. Jiannong Cao named the Fellow of China Computer Federation

We are proud to announce that Prof. Jiannong Cao, Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in Data Science and Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing, has recently been named the Fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF), the leading organisation on computing technology and applications in China. With the outstanding achievements and contributions in distributed computing, wireless network and mobile computing and big data analysis, Prof. Cao was elected as one of the nine CCF Fellows this year. Prof. Cao has joined COMP since 1997. He has published more than 500 papers in major international journals and conference proceedings. He has also directed and participated in over 130 research and development projects. For his exceptional research efforts, Prof. Cao has also been named Fellow of IEEE, Distinguished Member of ACM, and a member of Academia Europaea. His research interests include distributed systems and blockchain, wireless sensing and networking, big data and machine learning, and mobile cloud and edge computing. The honour from CCF further reflects Prof. Cao’s outstanding accomplishments in the field of computer science for the advancement of public benefit. CCF Fellow Program was initiated in 2008 to recognise those members who have made outstanding achievements in the field of computer science or made exceptional contributions to CCF and have membership for more than five consecutive years. CCF Fellow is the highest level in the membership of CCF and currently, there are 150 CCF fellows, accounting for 0.32% of professional members. Congratulations to Prof. Cao on attaining this honour!

COMP Mentorship Programme 2021/22 virtual kick-off cum Career Talk

Starting from 2019/20, COMP has collaborated with the Computing Alumni Association (CAA) to launch the mentorship programme which aims to enhance students’ holistic learning experience. This year, we have invited 10 alumni who are professional practitioners and industry executives as our mentors. A virtual kick-off gathering cum career talk was held on 18 January. Dr Henry Chan, our Associate Professor and Associate Head (Partnership & Collaboration) delivered the welcome remarks and thanked mentors for their contribution and support. Mr Darron Sun, President of CAA and the Mentorship Coordinator greeted all participants and briefly introduced the mentorship programme. One of our mentors, Mr Tony Chung, Senior Vice President of Data Services from Asia Satellite Telecommunications, was the invited speaker to give a talk on “My Career Story”. At the end of his presentation, he summarised three important elements of career development: ‘dedication’, ‘enjoyment’ and ‘persistent’. We have also invited Mr Christopher Cheung and Mr Bosco Lin, representatives from BlackPine, to share a range of career and internship opportunities with the participants. Various breakout rooms were arranged for both mentees and mentors to have in-depth group discussions. Under the mentorship programme, each participating student is assigned to a mentor and group activities with other mentors will also be organised to promote cross-industry sharing. In other words, it offers reciprocal opportunities for mentees to know about workplace culture, business trends and prospects in established professions, widening their exposure to different career paths and options while at the same time for mentors to understand the career aspirations of the younger generation. Through mentor-mentee activities, we hope to encourage students to acquire skills in career planning and personal development as well as broaden their social networks.

CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund Scholar Reward Program

Jointly launched by Tencent and the China Computer Federation (CCF) in 2013, the CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Young Faculty Open Research Fund (the Fund) is committed to building a platform for industry-university research cooperation and academic exchanges for young scholars. A scholar reward program was established to further support scientific research cooperation and the personal development of scholars. We are glad to announce that two COMP scholars recently received awards under the Fund in recognition of their academic excellence during the collaboration and projects with achievements ready for commercialisation. Award Project Awardee 2020 CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund - Cooperation Award Comment-Aware Weakly-Supervised Classification for Social Media Texts Dr Jing Li, Assistant Professor 2020 CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund - Excellence Award Deep Program Synthesis Based Hardened Code Analysis Dr Lei Xue, Research Assistant Professor

PolyU Info Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes

On 8 January 2022, COMP hosted an online info seminar to introduce the Master of Science in Information Technology (MScIT) programme during PolyU Info Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes, attracting more than 150 participants. Dr Korris Chung, Associate Professor and MSc Scheme Coordinator began the seminar by briefly introducing the Department. He then shared the trend of hot IT topics including Artificial Intelligence and Big Data with the attendees while Dr Daniel Luo, Associate Professor, talked about the development of Financial Technology. Dr Ken Yiu, Associate Professor and MScIT Programme Leader, further illustrated the programme structure, subjects offered, study patterns, admission requirements, etc. In response to the rapid development of the global IT industry and the huge demand for AI and fintech talents, two streams are introduced in the MScIT programme: “Stream in AI and Big Data” and “Stream in AI and FinTech”. Students enjoy the flexibility to choose their specialisms based on their own career goals and study plan. With the extensive network of COMP MSc alumni, students can acquire both advanced expertise and professional networks that help them scale new heights in their careers. The seminar provided prospective students with an excellent opportunity to obtain first-hand information about our MSc programme and academic advice from COMP faculty members.