News

Thousands of visitors were attracted to COMP at PolyU Education Info Day 2018

PolyU Education Info Day was smoothly concluded on 6 October. To provide visitors with comprehensive information on the programmes on offer, COMP organised various activities including exhibition and consultation, information seminars, and guided laboratory tours with live demonstration. A “Career Talk on FinTech & AI” was specially arranged for Career Teachers of secondary schools to obtain details of our new undergraduate programme – BSc (Hons) in Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence*. At COMP booth, our Augmented Reality (AR) photo counters attracted many visitors and they had much fun by experiencing the AR technologies. Throughout the day, there were lively interaction and fruitful exchange between the visitors, our students and academic staff. PolyU Education Day is an annual event which provides an excellent platform for prospective students, parents and the public to obtain first-hand information on undergraduate programmes, admission requirements and career prospects. *This programme is subject to approval.

Faculty Awards for Outstanding Performance/ Achievement 2017/18

Congratulations to Dr Ajay Kumar, our Associate Professor on receiving the Faculty Award for his Outstanding Performance/ Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities in 2017/18. Dr Kumar has joined COMP since 2007, and his research interests include Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Biometric Authentication and Recognition, Defect Detection in Textured Materials, and Multimodal Intelligent Interfaces. The Faculty Awards winners are chosen by a Faculty Assessment Panel comprising Heads (or his/ her delegate) and chaired by Dean of Faculty, from amongst a pool of well-qualified nominees put forward by individual departments. The selection is made with reference to the indicative criteria for assessment as laid down by the University.

Lunch gathering for COMP freshmen

New semester has just begun for few weeks. To facilitate freshmen adaptation to university life, COMP arranged a lunch gathering for first year students on 14 September, providing them an opportunity to meet with our academic staff members and mingle with fellow students. Dr Henry Chan and Dr Hong-va Leong, our Associate Professors & Associate Heads encouraged the students to participate in different learning activities apart from studying and gave their views on how interactive study could be. Two senior year students were also invited to share their 32-week local internship experience, allowing freshmen to understand an alternative to Work-Integrated Education at COMP.

Corda Training/ Certification Programme

To provide COMP students with more hands-on experience in blockchain application development, COMP collaborated with the Hong Kong Blockchain Society to launch a Corda Training/ Certification Programme (TCP) starting from March 2018. Students who successfully completed the TCP could take part in Corda Developer Certification with the sponsorship from the Department on the examination fees. “The Corda workshop is very informative and insightful for us. We can learn some practical skills with Blockchain technology, for example, in the insurance and banking industry. The workshop enables us know more about what ‘Financial Technology’ is and I hope I can make good use of what I have learnt in this workshop in the future, “ said Ms Ching Ki Wong, Year 1 student of BSc (Hons) in Financial Technology (Top-up Degree programme). This summer, six students from the same top-up degree programme undertook a 2-month internship at eMALI.IO, a Hong Kong based blockchain start-up where they could practically apply their knowledge on information security and distributed ledger technologies. They were responsible for performing blockchain research, implementing different cryptographic protocols and building up a decentralised credential system by using Hyperledger Fabric.

COMP MSc Orientation Session 2018

On 1 September, over 150 COMP new taught postgraduate students participated in the Orientation Session at PolyU. Prof. Qin Lu, our Professor and Interim Head, welcomed the new students by introducing the Department and highlighting the learning experience at COMP. The academic and teaching staff of our taught postgraduate programme team conducted different information sessions to explain further on our programme structure, study path, subjects offered, departmental facilities and resources, allowing the students to get familiar with COMP before the commencement of the new semester.

COMP Orientation Session 2018

COMP Orientation Session was organised on 28 August with a participation of over 130 new students. At the opening, Prof. Qin Lu, Professor and Interim Head of COMP introduced the Department to the students and shared her insights on university study. Dr Henry Chan, our Associate Professor and Associate Head, introduced the Academic Advising System and important information on various supports available to COMP students. We also invited representatives from other administrative units to talk about different resources and services offered at PolyU. COMP Orientation was concluded with some team building activities for which students and their Academic Advisors worked and interacted very well together and had a joyful afternoon. The Orientation provided an effective platform for students to meet their Academic Advisors and connect with them before the commencement of the new academic year. Welcome all freshmen! We wish them a fruitful and rewarding learning journey at COMP.

Research workshop on “Some Recent Advances Computer Vision and Deep Learning”

COMP organised a research workshop “Some Recent Advances on Computer Vision and Deep Learning” at PolyU on 16 August. It included a series of thematic seminars offered by various scholars from the U.S., Korea and Japan. The workshop began with Prof. Ming-Hsuan Yang, Researcher at Google and Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of University of California. Prof. Yang presented recent results on Learning Filters and Style Transfer. The next speaker was Prof. Yasuyuki Matsushita from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology of Osaka University. He shared his view on “Light Structure from Pin Motion: Geometric Point Light Calibration” with the participants. After a short break with lively discussion, Prof. Kyoung Mu Lee from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Seoul National University introduced SeedNet, an Automatic Seed Generation Technique with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Interactive Segmentation. At the end, Prof. Lei Zhang, Chair Professor and Associate Head of COMP, concluded the workshop by delivering a presentation on a PID Controller Approach to Deep Network Optimization. There was a very good engagement and interaction between the speakers and the attendees.

COMP Research Teams Won in the 2018 Creative Software System Contest

On 25 - 26 July, two COMP research teams under the supervision of Dr Shuai Li participated in the 2018 Creative Software System Contest in Taiwan and won the First Prize and Merit Award based on the innovativeness, functionality and application, feasibility and interface of their projects. Mr Guohao Fu and Mr Xiangyuan Jiang won the First Prize with the project titled “Source Seeking of a Mobile Robot with Manipulator for Chemical Leakage”. In view of the Mexico oil spill incident few years ago and its hazardous impact to the environment, the team designed a more effective estimation-based control for source exploration in olfactory propagation fields by explicitly using random exploration strategy and employing mobile robot manipulator. Another project “A Solution for Automatic Physical Parameter Measurement of Industrial Manipulators” proposed by Mr Aquil Mirza Mohammed and Mr Yinyan Zhang received the Merit Award. The solution involves an online learning and control algorithm that could allow users to control the end-effector position of an industrial manipulator while learning its physical parameters. The expected product consists of a motion controller with some sensors for end-effector detection. The competition was hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of Tamkang University and it covered topics related to smart computing, unmanned vehicle applications, smart agriculture, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and smart medical care, attracting more than 200 participants from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.

The 5th Computer App Programming (CAP) Day

CAP Day is an annual competition jointly organised by COMP and the Hong Kong Association for Computer Education (HKACE), with the support of IEEE Hong Kong Section Computer Society Chapter. To train up student’s programming and computing skills, CAP Day includes “Problem-solving Competition” and “Student Project Competition”. In the preliminary round of the Problem-solving Competition conducted earlier in May, a hundred students from 23 secondary schools with the highest scores were qualified to enter the finals held at PolyU on 14 July. Contestants had to complete mobile apps in 90 minutes by using App Inventor in order to strive for the championship. The participants of the Student Project Competition also presented their projects to the judges on that day and the three winning teams were from HKTA The Yuen Yuen Institute No.1 Secondary School, Po Leung Kuk Laws Foundation College and Lok Sin Tong Ku Chiu Man Secondary School. Prof. Qin Lu, Professor and Interim Head of COMP and Dr David Chung, JP, Under Secretary of the Innovation and Technology Bureau officiated the closing ceremony and presented trophies and prizes to the winners. Mr Wai Ming Kam, Chairman of HKACE and Dr Henry Chan, Associate Professor and Associate Head of COMP also joined the ceremony. CAP Day provides an excellent platform for teenagers to learn about programming techniques, solve practical problems by logical thinking, develop computational knowledge, and foster creativity and teamwork.

Visit of Beijing University of Technology

A group of 30 students from Beijing University of Technology visited COMP on 24 July. Prof. Jane You, Professor & Associate Head, met the students at the opening and introduced the Department and research studies. Dr Simon Shiu, Assistant Professor and Scheme Leader of Taught Postgraduate Programme, gave an overview of our Master of Science programmes and offered some advices on admission and prospect. We also invited some research students to share their postgraduate study experience at computing. That evening, the group had a guided tour to PolyU House of Innovation and other facilities around the campus. On 27 July, Prof. Keith Chan, Associate Professor, arranged a One-day Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the visiting students. Topics covered the latest AI technology, Python programming and chatbot. At the end of the workshop, Prof. Qin Lu, Professor & Interim Head, presented certificates to all attendees.