Research Focus Areas

The “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” Focus Area explores basic research on artificial intelligence and robotics, in particular extending artificial intelligence to robotics. The missions of the team are:

• to carry out original research on artificial intelligence and robotics, and their applications;
• to act as a strong research base to foster international collaborations; and
• to transfer academic research results into practical uses to benefit the industrial, commercial, and service sectors.

Research is carried out on machine learning, computer vision, and speech and image processing techniques for

• 3D and multi-view videos, coding, transcoding, ultra HDTV, mobile videos (Dr Y.L. Chan)
• 3D scene and object reconstruction, 3D object detection and recognition (Professor Kenneth Lam, Dr Daniel Lun)
• Bioinformatics, DNA in signal processing, forensics (Dr Bonnie Law)
• Computational intelligence, intelligent control, robotics (Dr Frank Leung)
• Facial image analysis, emotion recognition, face recognition (Professor Kenneth Lam)
• Image and video super-resolution, image restoration and processing (Dr Chris Chan, Professor Kenneth Lam)
• Privacy-preserving machine learning, adversarial machine learning, deep learning, deep neural networks (Dr H. Hu, Professor Kenneth Lam, Dr Daniel Lun, Professor M.W. Mak)
• Speech processing, recognition, speaker verification (Dr Daniel Lun, Professor M.W. Mak)

Mobile communication networks (also called cellular communication networks) were first deployed in the 1980’s. Over the past four decades, they have evolved from the first generation (1G) analog networks, to 2G digital networks (e.g., GSM and CDMA), and then to the subsequent 3G and 4G networks. During this period of time, other wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth have also emerged and advanced continually. While these mobile/wireless networks were originally designed for human-to-human communications (e.g., voice call) or human-to-machine communications (e.g., video streaming and online games), they have recently been heavily used for machine-to-machine communications (e.g., remote sensing, fleet management, Internet of Things (IoT) devices).

According to the reports published by Statista, the number of mobile users worldwide is estimated as 6.8 billions in 2019, and is forecast to increase to 7.33 billions in 2023. Over the same period, the number of IoT devices will increase from 26.66 billions to 51.11 billions. To fulfill the ever increasing demands (e.g., more users, higher download speeds, shorter time delay) from a wide range of applications (vehicular communications, augmented reality, smart city, smart factory), the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks have begun their commercial deployments in 2019. Moreover, the largest deployment is seen in China, where the number of 5G users is predicted to be 110 millions by 2020.

The “Future Wireless Networks and IoT” Focus Area at the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering aims at researching fundamental problems related to 5G and beyond networks as well as IoT devices. Research topics include cybersecurity, vehicular networks, channel coding, Edge AI, etc.  The team is very active in teaching, research as well as professional society activities.  The team receives research funding from the Hong Kong government, the China government, and industrial partners such as Huawei. The team also carries out consultancy works for the Hong Kong government (e.g, Highways Department and OGCIO) and the industry (e.g., HKJC). The team members are briefly introduced in the following,

Photonics underpins various engineering applications in energy, imaging, sensing, communication, nanotech, advanced manufacturing and biomedical applications. Traditionally, photonics as a discipline of science is a large field of study on its own that probes the most fundamental aspects of nature with profound consequences to humanity. As an enabling technology, photonics is typically subsumed under the fields of communication, energy, imaging to name a few and each respective sub-field of photonics is itself a growing area of research.

PolyU has a long track record of research excellence in optical communications, sensing, energy, imaging and other biomedical applications. The group collaborated extensively with the industry with numerous world-record breaking experiments, technology commercialization and spin-off companies. Various research facilities have been established including fibre draw tower and high capacity optical communication system testbed.

The “Photonic Systems and Devices” Focus Area at the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering aims to study key devices and systems for energy, imaging, sensing and communication applications. The key members and their research areas are introduced in the following.