News

COMP Undergraduate Orientation Session 2021

To prepare new students for adapting to university studies, COMP organised the Orientation Session virtually for all new undergraduates on 24 August 2021, attracting nearly 200 freshmen. Ir Prof. HC Man, Dean of Faculty of Engineering, officiated the Orientation by extending his warm welcome to students and encouraged them to grasp every opportunity to learn during the time at PolyU, while Dr Hong Va Leong, our Associate Professor and Associate Head (Teaching & Learning), began with the Academic Advising System and learning initiatives at COMP. Various lecturers were invited to briefly introduce the subjects they will be teaching for Year 1. The Orientation also covered Work-Integrated Education and internship, and other student supports and services offered by PolyU. The Orientation was concluded with individual group meetings in breakout rooms between the students and their designated Academic Advisors, who will guide them throughout their studies at COMP, providing them with a great chance to get connected before the commencement of the new academic year. We wish all newbies a fruitful and rewarding learning journey.

Call for Nominations: Outstanding Alumni Award of Department of Computing 2022

The year 2022 marks the 85th Anniversary of PolyU. New features are introduced to the Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award (OPAA) including adding awards at department and faculty levels, to recognise our distinguished alumni’s diverse accomplishments and contributions. The Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Department aims to give public recognition to outstanding graduates of a PolyU academic department for their professional achievements and significant contributions to the community and their alma mater.   Award Categories and Selection Criteria The OPAA will be conducted at three levels: Department level, Faculty/ School level and University level. The recipients of the Department Award will be nominated to the Faculty Award. All Faculty/ School awardees will be considered for the University Award.   There are four achievement categories, namely “Professional Achievement”, “Entrepreneurial Achievement”, “Scholarly Achievement” and “Community Service Achievement”. Selection is based on the nominee’s accomplishments in his/ her personal achievements in the field, contributions to the community, and support and contributions to PolyU. Special recognition to young alumni awardees in the award category is added. A candidate who is aged under 40 by the end of the award year can be considered under the Outstanding PolyU Young Alumni stream. Eligibility The nominated candidate must be a bona fide graduate who has successfully completed the full-time or part-time programme offered by PolyU (or its forerunners: Hong Kong Government Trade School, Hong Kong Technical College, Hong Kong Polytechnic; and its constituent units: School of Professional Education & Executive Development and Hong Kong Community College) which led to academic award accredited by the respective Institution.   The proposer can be a PolyU graduate, Honorary Graduate, University Fellow, PolyU staff, current PolyU Council and Court member and current Advisory Committee member. There is no limit to the number of nominations to be submitted by each proposer. However, the proposer cannot be the candidate himself/ herself or a direct relative of the candidate.   Nomination and Selection Schedule The Department of Computing (COMP) is now inviting nominations for the Outstanding Alumni Award of Department of Computing 2022. Please download the Nomination Form and return it to comp.marketing@polyu.edu.hk with all required supplementary documents on or before 31 December 2021.   Selection for the Department Award will be conducted by early Jan 2022. Panel of Judges A panel of judges, comprising both internal and external members, will be formed to examine the nominations and assess candidates’ qualifications and performance for the awards.   Enquiries Department of Computing The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Email: comp.marketing@polyu.edu.hk

PolyU Two-day University Experience Programme 2021

On 3 – 4 August, the Faculty of Engineering (FENG) organised the Two-day University Experience (TUE) Programme online under the theme of “From Physics and ICT to Engineering”, aiming at Secondary 4 to 5 students who are taking Science, ICT, or M1/ M2 subjects. FENG arranged a series of thematic online lectures and quizzes on seven fields of engineering during these two days. Dr Henry Chan, our Associate Professor and Associate Head, represented FENG to officiate the opening of TUE and welcomed the attendees. To begin the COMP’s session, Dr Chan introduced some basic computing concepts with an interactive game to arouse students’ interest. Dr Peter Ng, our Teaching Fellow, delivered a mini-lecture on “Game Technologies” directly afterwards. Students were able to grasp the idea of game development and computer vision including Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). To further illustrate the know-how, they were taken on a virtual tour of our VR and Game Lab. Dr Ng also demonstrated a machine learning project “physical toys recognising” and created two online polling questions about maths in game programming and machine learning for students to express their views. It attracted more than 140 participants. After the closing ceremony, Dr Walter Fung and Dr Richard Lui, our Teaching Fellows, met and chit-chat with the students in the breakout room where they could know more about the study life at COMP and our teaching initiatives. TUE Programme provides a valuable opportunity for secondary students to engage with university academics and experience university learning during the summertime.

Cybersecurity seminar for undergraduates

To equip our undergraduate students with the knowledge and skills in cybersecurity and assist them in planning their pathways for further studies or career development in the field, COMP hosted an online seminar “How to be a competent cybersecurity researcher and practitioner?” on 2 August 2021. Cybersecurity has become one of the issues that arouse public concern, along with the rise in popularity of financial technologies and related applications, e.g., virtual banking and digital identity. Cybersecurity threats keep evolving, mutating, and occurring in different circumstances. The research community is constantly exploring these vulnerabilities, proposing new models and protocols to fulfil the security requirements of these applications. Dr Daniel Luo, our Associate Professor, and Dr Dennis Liu, our Teaching Fellow, shared with the participants the research on smart contract analysis by addressing the research questions in detail and illustrating concrete research examples. Dr Luo also talked about smart contract security from the practitioners’ perspectives and offered professional advice for the better implementation of smart contracts in blockchain applications. The seminar enabled students to understand the process of doing research on cybersecurity as well as various channels and resources to explore new knowledge.

Blockchain technology training programme for OGCIO

COMP and PolyU’s Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship Office (KTEO) jointly organised a training programme on blockchain technology for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) from June 2019 to May 2021. Dr Daniel Luo, our Associate Professor and Dr Dennis Liu, our Teaching Fellow were two of the workshop trainers. Over 1,500 trainees were benefited from this two-year programme. The blockchain training programme included a series of one-day core classes and two-day advanced courses, targeting all analysts and programmers of OGCIO. We held 24 sessions of the introductory class and five sessions of hands-on training in total. The one-day class provided the participants with an overview of technological development and market trends of blockchain technology, as well as good practices for planning and managing blockchain projects. The trainers introduced the basic concept and growth of blockchain in today’s environment and context and shared some local and global real cases from the private and public sectors. To encourage the trainees to think further and explore possibilities in applying the knowledge to their work, trainers conducted a group discussion and the class voted for the most innovative idea. The two-day training focused on the technical hands-on exercises with various real-world case studies and other interesting examples to deepen trainees knowledge and extend their skills in blockchain technology. They learnt not only about the architecture of blockchain networks but were also taught to develop blockchain applications using Hyperledger Fabric. Overall, the participants understood the importance and value of blockchain technology and they became aware of incorporating blockchain into their future project planning.

COMP undergraduate won First Prize in the COMPSAC’s first Annual Student OER Contest

The IEEE Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) organised its first Annual Student Open Educational Resources (OER) Contest and Alex Zhang Caiqi, (BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 3) won the First Prize with his OER work titled “Learning Computing by Card Magic”. OERs are publicly available web-accessible entities that can be used for teaching and learning. Many instructors around the world use OERs to supplement their teaching. ‘’Learning Computing by Card Magic’’ is a practical video tutorial created by Alex that aims at teaching basic computing knowledge by playing card magic. To arouse the interest of the audience, Alex first shows a card trick followed by an explanation of the underlying coding concepts. A simple program is formulated at the end to simulate the magic procedure. It helps to improve students’ programming skills and consolidate their understanding of the related theories by using “magic” as an innovative and attractive medium in the OER. “I really appreciate my supervisor, Dr Henry Chan, who gave me so many precious suggestions about my work and recommended me to join the contest,” Alex said. He is considering developing the magic computing tutorial into a series, illustrating other computing knowledge such as the conversion between decimal numbers and binary numbers, and common data structures, with more examples.

Dr Daniel Luo received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2021

We are pleased to announce that Dr Daniel Luo, Associate Professor of COMP, together with his PhD student, Xian Zhan, and other researchers recently received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021) with the paper titled “ATVHunter: Reliable Version Detection of Third-Party Libraries for Vulnerability Identification in Android Applications”. Since third-party libraries (TPLs) have been widely used in mobile apps, accurate detection of TPLs in Android apps is essential to many security and software maintenance tasks, such as repackaged apps identification, vulnerability discovery, etc. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to identify TPLs accurately due to the challenges like TPL dependency, code obfuscation, and diverse versions. In this paper, the research team proposed and developed a novel system named ATVHunter, which can pinpoint the precise vulnerable in-app TPL versions and provide detailed information about the vulnerabilities and TPLs. Extensive experimental results showed that ATVHunter outperforms state-of-the-art TPL detection tools in terms of accuracy and efficiency. To investigate the ecosystem of the vulnerable TPLs used by apps, the research team constructed a comprehensive vulnerable TPL dataset and used ATVHunter to conduct a large-scale analysis on the apps from Google Play store. ATVHunter found 9,050 apps including vulnerable TPL versions with 53,337 vulnerabilities and 7,480 security bugs, most of which have high risks and were not recognised by app developers. This result uncovered severe security issues in mobile apps and is very important to mobile app developers, users and security researchers. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is the premier software engineering conference. Since 1975, ICSE has provided a forum where researchers, practitioners, and educators gather together to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and issues in the field of software engineering.

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition at PolyU

The Faculty of Engineering (FENG) of PolyU held its first Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT®) on 18 June, challenging the research students nominated by their affiliated departments in FENG to present their research theses within three minutes. COMP’s representative, Hou Ningning, won the ‘People’s Choice Award’ with her thesis titled “‘LoRa, can I trust you?’ Security threats and countermeasures in IoT”. The award was voted by the audience online after all students’ presentation. The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing human lives. More and more daily objects are connected to the Internet, making them become smarter and offer better services. However, as with many technologies, there are questions of its future and implications on society, especially IoT security. IoT devices are usually embedded devices that have limited resources for security, and traditional security solutions will not run on these devices. Therefore, the communication security of IoT devices will be a big problem in the future. Ningning’s thesis focuses on security problems in IoT, LoRa security, in particular. LoRa is a promising IoT communication technology that can transmit up to 3 km in an urban environment, while other IoT tech like WiFi and Bluetooth can only transmit no more than 50 metres. As such, LoRa is suitable for wide-area communication. In the research, Ningning investigates the potential security threats of LoRa and proposes the corresponding countermeasures against such attacks. “Today, organisations usually deploy IoT with security and privacy as an afterthought. I hope my research can raise the awareness of the government, industry as well as end-users,” Ningning said. “I would like to thank all my friends and my supervisor for helping me prepare for this competition. My sincere thanks also go to all the audience who vote for me.” Developed by the University of Queensland, Australia, 3MT® cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills, as well as supports their capacity to effectively explain their research and its significance in three minutes, in a language appropriate to non-specialist audiences. 3MT® is now a globally recognised competition that has been held in over 900 universities across more than 80 countries worldwide. PolyU is one of the participating universities this year.

COMP undergraduate shined in the Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards 2020

Declan Leung Chun-hin (BSc (Hons) in Enterprise Information Systems, Year 4) teamed up with another PolyU student from the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences to join the Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards 2020 and finally won the Silver Award and Best Business Potential Award with their project “Smart Bracelet”. Hong Kong is transitioning slowly into an ageing populated society. Every elderly (aged 65+) is currently supported by 3.5 working adults but this number is expected to decrease to less than 2 by 2030. It is estimated that 25% of the elderly people fall more than once in a year while a timely response within the first two hours is highly important for them as it increases their survival rate beyond one year by up to 35%. However, fewer caregivers resulted from a lower birth rate and more elderly choosing to live independently cause a rise in elderly fall which becomes one of the stress factors for the caregivers and society as a whole. “We are excited to turn our innovative idea into a gerontech product that assists the daily life of the elderly,” Declan shared. “We hope that both the well-being of the elderly can be enhanced and the burden of caregivers can be relieved.” The Chun Wo Innovation Student Awards aims at encouraging tertiary students in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to solve problems relating to infrastructure, technology and social development in the city through an engineering approach. This year over 70 teams participated in the competition under the theme of “Engineers for a Smart Future”.

Prof. Song Guo named the Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering

We are proud to announce that Prof. Song Guo, Professor and Associate Head (Research & Development) of COMP, was recently named Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), the national institution of Canada that comprises its most accomplished engineers who have expressed their dedication to the application of science and engineering principles. Fellows of CAE are nominated and elected by their peers. In view of their outstanding contributions to engineering, and for the service as role models in their fields and to their communities, a total of 52 new Fellows from all over the world were elected into the Academy this year. Prof. Guo is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member and a Highly Cited Researcher 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. Congratulations to Prof. Guo on attaining this honour.