Singapore’s First Location Based Service on Mobile (Dec 2008)
Taking the lead and designing tools to improve the way we live, computer science undergraduates Chua Khim Teck and Rajamoorthy s/o Karapaya together with Low Hang Wei from the Nanyang Business School have created a unique location based social networking tool that allows mobile users to locate friends in their vicinity, attain up-to-the minute information and receive updates on discounts. Designed to revolutionise the social networking scene as well as bridge the gap between the virtual world and reality, MyWobile will also serve as a cost efficient and effective platform for developers to build and deploy applications for location based services. Together with key industry partners Azione Capital and Microsoft the students look to improve on the capabilities of MyWobile, where they intend to include other features such as gaming. Presently, the MyWobile is free for download and is able to run on Symbian Series 60, 3rd edition phones and will soon be available for Windows Mobile.
For more information please visit MyWobile
SCE Lauded for Best Paper at GCC2008 Conference (Oct 2008)
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Front Row (from left to right): Assoc Prof Lee Bu Sung, Zhang Junwei
Back Row (from left to right): Assoc Prof Yeo Chai Kiat, Asst Prof Tang Xueyan
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The International Conference on Grid and Cooperative Computing (GCC), looks to address the rapid advances in various grid-related technologies, grid middleware and grid applications. As such, it has earned great popularity as the world’s largest scientific event in the area of grid and cooperative computing.
Participating at the 7th GCC 2008 held in Shenzhen, China was PhD student Zhang Junwei. Junwei’s paper titled, Impact of Parallel Download on Job Scheduling in Data Grid Environment, co-authored by SCE Professors Lee Bu Sung, Yeo Chai Kiat and Tang Xueyan, had managed to clinch the title of Best Paper and was lauded at this prestigious conference.
SCE Team Wins Inaugural Yahoo! Mobile Developers Contest (Oct 2008)
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From left to right: Matthias Kunze, Managing Director for Yahoo! Connected Life in Asia , James, Gwee Xue Qian, Tan Zhong Xing, Lim Jing-Yi
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A total of 24 teams from six local tertiary institutes pitted their wits against each other to engineer the best mobile widgets (mini applications for mobile phones) for four corporate brands, DBS Bank, Kellogg Asia, Malaysia Airlines and UEEEU.com at the inaugural contest, hosted by Yahoo!. Picking up the challenge were SCE students James, Gwee Xue Qian, Lim Jing-Yi and Tan Zhong Xing who formed winning team, Simple. Using Yahoo!’s Blueprint ™ platform, the three Business and Computing undergraduates impressed the panel of distinguished judges with their creative presentation skills and simple-to-use widget. Designed for DBS Bank, the mobile widget helps customers conveniently locate branches and ATMs, and access information on bank products and credit card privileges. At the awards ceremony held yesterday, at Zouk, our winning team walked away with a cash prize and the title - Best in Show mobile widget.
“The widget interface is simple to use and makes it easy for consumers to access and request information from their mobile phone. The creation of mobile widgets fits perfectly with DBS' strategy of providing convenient access to our customers across a multi-channel distribution platform," said Jowena Liang, SVP & Head of Consumer Marketing & Internet Banking, Consumer Banking Group, DBS Bank on our students’ submission.
SCE Congratulates Winners Of Mash-It-Up Competition (Oct 2008)
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Second Prize - Team “Work Life Balance”
From left to right: Huang Sile, Han Jiong Siew Dobson, Long Jiren, Ms Jessica Tan, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore and John Fernandes, Director, Developer Platform Evangelism Group.
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Third Prize - Team “Inviting Me”
From left to right: Toh Eryi, Tan Bang Yan Ian-louis, Goh Kai Wei, Ms Jessica Tan, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore and John Fernandes, Director, Developer Platform Evangelism Group.
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SCE dominated Microsoft’s Mash-It-Up Competition with two winning entries, from teams: Work-Life-Balance and Inviting Me who took second and third place respectively. In this competition, the 35 participating teams were required to create the most compelling mash-up in 24 hours, using Microsoft’s Popfly technology. Popfly Mashups allow participants to combine data and media from different sources to create websites according to the users’ preference. The teams were tested on their technical know-how as well as their ability to think creatively. Points were given to those whose blocks were used or mashed-up with other teams.
Congratulations to the above winning teams from SCE.
For more information on the competition, please click here
Microsoft Research Asia 2008-2009 Fellowship Award (Sep 2008)
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2008-2009 MSRA Fellow – Huang Yi
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PhD student Huang Yi has been shortlisted by Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) lab as one of the ‘best and the brightest in Asia and the Pacific Area’, for her outstanding research work. Rewarding her for her contributions and diligence in the scientific field, she was among the 32 students that had been awarded with the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship (2008-2009). This year, 99 distinguished PhD candidates from 48 leading research institutions were nominated for fellowships, where each had their credentials and research projects thoroughly evaluated by a reviewing committee. The MSRA Fellowship Program started ten years ago of which, two hundred and fifty PhD candidates from fifty institutions have served as fellows. The program has been highly successful in fostering advances and collaboration in computer science and research.
Two SCE Proposals Awarded Funding under the MOE, NRF R&D Programme (Sep 2008)
A total of 23 proposals were submitted to the Ministry of Education (MOE) for the NRF’s R&D programme on IDM in Education. Each proposal was carefully evaluated by the Ministry’s International Expert Panel in June 2008. Among the proposals shortlisted, two belonged to SCE.
The School would like to congratulate Associate Professor Goh Wooi Boon and Assistant Professor Miao Chun Yan for being awarded funding for their respective projects!
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Principal Investigator
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Project Title
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Associate Professor Goh Wooi Boon
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Using embedded technology support (i-Cube) for children’s concept development through play
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Assistant Professor Miao Chun Yan
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Intelligent Agent-Augmented Multi-User Virtual Environments: Research into Designs for Learning Environments of the Future
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See full report
The First Location Based Film in the World (Sep 2008)
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From left to right: Assistant Professor Scott Hessels, Aswath Krishnan and Neha Chachra
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SCE students Neha Chachra (CSC/4) and Aswath Krishnan (CE/4), together with fellow counterparts from the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) have discovered a revolutionary new way of viewing movies. The GPS Film combines entertainment with technology to generate a unique movie experience. Designed and implemented by our students, this novel software application uses real time GPS data of the viewer’s location and movement, to reveal a story. This project is funded by the Ministry of Education and has already gained rave reviews from the press, after its premier on 5 September 2008. It has also been showcased at the prestigious ISEA 2008 exhibition. A paper titled, GPS Film-Location Based Cinema has been co-authored by Aswath Krishnan and Neha Chachra to explain the design, possible future expansions and uses of this application. The paper has been selected for presentation at the International Symposium on GPS/GNSS 2008, to be hosted on 11-14 November 2008, in Tokyo.
For more details please visit here
SCE selected as HP Labs Innovation Research Award Recipient (Aug 2008)
More than 450 proposals discussing a multitude of topics from 200 universities in 28 countries were reviewed by HP for the 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Awards. From among the many proposals, one belonged to SCE’s very own, Assistant Professor Anwitaman Datta for his winning proposal titled, “Understanding and Exploiting the Dynamics of Collaboration Ecosystems”. This global scale award is designed to encourage open cooperation with HP Labs, HP’s central research arm, in aims of producing mutually beneficial and impactful research.
Assistant Professor Anwitaman Datta will be joined by SCE counterpart, Assistant Professor Sun Aixin in this research initiative, focused on exploiting the dynamics in collaboration social networks to enhance productivity in the workplace. The magnitude of this global competition has further propelled the School’s standing in the global research arena.
For more on award please view:
Best Student Paper Award at JCDL’08 (Jun 2008)
PhD student Huang Yi won the Best Student Paper Award at the recent Joint Conference in Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2008. Her paper titled User-Assisted Ink Bleed Correction for Handwritten Documents, co-written with former supervisor Michael S Brown, took centre-stage at this conference. The event was hosted from 16-20 June at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and serves as a major international forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues.
The paper describes a user-assisted framework for correcting ink-bleed found in old handwritten documents. The goal is to provide a semi-automated approach that strives to provide good results while minimising user involvement. This user-assisted approach helps bridge the gap between full automation and manual editing to provide a practical tool for removing ink-bleed in hand written documents. Ultimately, “Our solution provides a user friendly interface with some intelligent tools to facilitate users to process ancient documents from scratch,” said Huang Yi.
SCE Makes a Splash at the Splash Awards 2008! (Jun 2008)
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| The NTUCoders, from left to right: Vu Minh Tan, Sun Zhong Yinan and Pham Chau Khoa |
SCE’s very own NTUCoders made a splash at this year’s Splash Awards 2008 – XChallenge, jointly organised by the Singapore Computer Society, IDA (Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore) and Microsoft. Our students, Sun Zhong Yinan, Pham Chau Khoa and Vu Minh Tan emerged champions at this 12 hour iron-coder competition.
This year’s event saw our students in search of solutions for one of the world’s toughest challenges – Creating a Sustainable Environment. The idea was for the students to apply state-of-the-art technology, with greater emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, to help solve a series of questions pertaining to environmental issues.
Even with the competition being around the same time as their exams, the students were able to muster their wits and put their best foot forward. From all at SCE, we would like to extend our congratulations to the NTUCoders, who have done the School proud!
Apple Student Scholarship Awarded to SCE Students (9-13 June 08)
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| SCE students in San Francisco: Pictured second to fifth (left to right), Yangfan, Husein William, Firdaus Fajar Maulana , Alimin Adi |
Ten SCE students were given a golden ticket each to travel to San Francisco for the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2008, to attend a five day event hosted by Apple, Inc. This event is reputed to be one of the most important annual events for software and hardware developers.
Through their technical ability, creativity of ideas in products and projects, together with their prior technical work and experience, our capable students were able to rule out the competition to clinch ten out of the 400 coveted Apple Student Scholarships offered worldwide.
Through the 150 informative sessions hosted, our students were given full access to the in-depth mechanics of technologies such as iPhone OS, Leopard and Leopard Server. Above all, this event gave them the opportunity to learn directly from Apple engineers, developers and user interface designers, providing them with a platform to propel their careers.
Congratulations to all ten students: Vuong Nhu Khue, Husein William, Lin Dewei, Yangfan, Alimin Adi, Thuy Diem Nguyen, Huang Zhenghao, Vu Vinh An, Firdaus Fajar Maulana and Soenaryo Edwin Boaz!
SCE Staff Awarded Merit Grant from EADS (Jun 2008)
Assistant Professor Vinod Achutavarrier Prasad and Associate Professor A S Madhukumar were awarded a $111,330 research grant from the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), for their project titled, Advanced Baseband Algorithms and Low Power Implementations for Wireless Communications”.
This project aims to develop signal processing architectures for multi-standard wireless communication transceivers, with opportunistic spectrum access. It is said to be potentially applicable to in-flight cellular communication.
The project was jointly reviewed by EADS and the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB).
Outstanding SCE Professor Receives Top Teaching Accolade at Nanyang Awards 2007 (Mar 2008)
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| Prof A S Madhukumar (right) with his family at Nanyang Awards 2008 |
Associate Professor A S Madhukumar has been teaching at NTU since 2003. His dedication to his profession has certainly not gone unnoticed. His fervor for the school and his students was duly recognised at the recent Nanyang Awards ceremony, held on 19 March 2008.
The award ceremony is a special occasion to recognise and celebrate the outstanding achievements and contributions of NTU faculty, staff and students. Naturally, this devoted professor received nothing less than the coveted Teaching Excellence Award.
Though delighted with his win, Prof Madhukumar feels he derives even greater satisfaction when students gain knowledge from his lectures. Prof Madhukumar finds great importance in creating an interactive learning environment where he masterfully juggles theory with doses of classroom humour. "He makes an effort to articulate clearly and raise students' interest by telling us Mathematics-related jokes," affirmed his student, Lim Kim Seah.
His ability to maintain such balance in the classroom makes every lesson refreshing. Indeed, he has set a fine example for others in his ability to impart knowledge to his students through a creative and supportive learning environment.
From all at SCE, congratulations to Prof Madhukumar!
USC Provost's Ph.D. Fellowship Program for SCE Student (Feb 2008)
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| Xu Kaijian received his prize for the poster competition from NTU Provost at the URECA Orientation / Prize Presentation 2007 |
Congratulations to computer engineering student, Xu Kaijian, for being among 100 students to clinch the Provost's Ph.D. Fellowship Program, from the University of Southern California (USC). With an annual stipend of $30,000, this fellowship will see him through four years of Ph.D. studies at USC.
These exceptional, highly sought-after students, were meticulously reviewed by a board of global scholars at USC. The students were evaluated on their potential to lead various disciplines into new worlds of knowledge.
A well-rounded student, Kaijian, an NTU President Research Scholar, feels that the Computer Engineering programme has provided him with a solid foundation. The practical hands-on experience from the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) has provided him with the tools to catapult himself further in his studies and career.
When asked about his Fellowship, he replied, “I wish to express special thanks to my URECA supervisor, Prof Chang Kuiyu and academic advisor, Prof Zhang Jun for all their guidance and advice!”
Lua Rui Ping Winner of IT Youth Award (Feb 2008)
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Rui Ping receiving IT Youth Award from Mr Wilson Tan, President of the Singapore Computer Society
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On stage, proud winners at IT Leader Awards 2008 together with Mr Wilson Tan, President of the Singapore Computer Society and Guest of Honour, Dr Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts
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A second year student at the School of Computer Engineering, Lua Rui Ping has clinched this year’s prestigious IT Youth Award - a category in the IT Leader Awards 2008, organized by the Singapore Computer Society. This accolade aims to recognize outstanding youths in the field of IT below the age of 26, who have distinguished themselves through their achievements and contributions to the development of the industry.
Rui Ping is the proud winner of more than 25 informatics and robotics competitions, and is also a recipient of the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors Award. Since 2006, he has worked on research and projects for local start-ups in the outsourcing industry. In 2007 with a scholarship awarded by Apple, Rui Ping represented Singapore at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
A dynamic student, Rui Ping has been a catalyst for the burgeoning interest in computer technology at NTU where he takes on these roles: NTU-Singapore Computer Society’s Student Representative, Microsoft Student Partner and SUN Campus Ambassador. In his stewardship, he has organized various technology programmes, road shows and student workshops.
Adding to his illustrious portfolio, Rui Ping is the founder of CODEX (Collaborative Developers Ecosystem Experiment) - an augmented virtual collaboration environment that serves as a platform for students to develop their own ideas and products. He is also part of the SCE team, led by Assistant Professor Alex Tay that has taken up the TechX Challenge – which seeks to defy conventional thinking and stretch the boundary of science and technology, for defence and national security.
Victory at the Undergraduate National Case Competition (UNCC) (Jan 2008)
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From left: Neo Shun Xiang Daryl, Zhang Peifei, Arthur Lee Gilbert (coach) Pham Phuong Dung and Quek Hong Soon
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From left: Shaun McDonell (president of UNCC committee), Neo Shun Xiang Daryl, Pham Phuong Dung and Zhang Peifei Quek Hong Soon
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Second year Business & Computing student, Zhang Peifei was among the four that formed the NBS team who traveled to Montreal and claimed top spot at this year’s UNCC. Held at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, this event saw 17 schools worldwide competing for the coveted title. Even with notable contenders such as University of South Carolina and Babson College, University of Washington and University of Southern California - all of which are well-known for their knack at case competitions - the NBS team did not falter instead, they impressed the judges with their unique presentation style.
The grueling three day competition saw the students participating in group stages the first two days, and the grand finals on the third. The final challenge required the students to juggle both their composure and wit as they made their presentation to an extended judging panel from the business world. They were also required to answer a myriad of questions on the spot. Preparation time for each day was only three hours however, under the supervision of advisor, Dr Arthur Lee Gilbert, from ITOM (Information Technology & Operations Management) Division, the team performed consistently well throughout the competition.
The NBS team certainly rose above its competition, thwarting University of Alberta, University of McMaster, University of Corvinus and University of South Carolina from claiming top spot of overall champion. According to Daryl Neo, NBS team leader, “Our win in Montreal shows us that NBS students can go out and stand on our own two feet against the North American schools and do well. I am glad that the support we received from the school in terms of training and funding has also been vindicated through this win!”
SCE Professors Honoured at Minister’s Innovation Awards Ceremony 2007 (Nov 2007)
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| On stage, the proud winners at MOT Awards Award Ceremony 2007 include: Prof Hsu Wen Jing and Prof Huang Shell Ying (first and fourth respectively from the left). |
Associate Professors Hsu Wen Jing and Huang Shell Ying, together with their industrial partners - Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) and Simplus colleagues were the proud recipients of the Merit Award at the Minister's Innovation Award 2007, held at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront.
Launched by the Ministry of Transport in 2002, this award recognises creative projects which have made an impact on Singapore’s transport infrastructure, where it aims to promote innovation and creativity in the Ministry and its statutory boards.
Both Prof Hsu and Prof Huang were applauded for their research and development efforts on container terminals. The product, a simulation software tool, is used to set up and model operations rapidly in a container terminal. This software takes careful consideration of spatial configurations, and operational policies to simulate the container operations in a realistic manner. It also produces animation and statistics that help users analyse efficiencies and identify bottlenecks in operations.
Looking back on the experience, Prof Huang commented, “The nature of our work can be classified as applied research (problem driven). It is an interesting experience because we need to use and adopt the knowledge obtained from basic research to see its benefits. At the same time, there are situations which are beneficial to and further inspire basic research. In addition, it is enriching to have industry insiders and leaders sharing their perspectives with us.”.
When asked about their achievement, Prof Hsu replied, “We wish to express our special thanks to NTU and SCE administration, as well as the MPA and Simplus colleagues”.
PhD student recognised at ICCV (Oct 2007)
Pham Minh Tri, a SCE PhD student based in the Centre for Multimedia & Network Technology (CeMNet), received a prestigious travel grant award from organizers of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). ICCV, the top and most competitive conference in computer vision, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 14 to 20 October 2007. Minh Tri’s ICCV paper was granted podium presentation status at a highly competitive acceptance rate of 3.9%. His paper “Fast training and selection of Haar features using statistics in boosting-based face detection”, co-authored with A/P Cham Tat Jen, presented a method for rapidly speeding up the training time for machine learned face detectors by cleverly exploiting statistics of classifier-projected exemplars. Face detectors, such as those used in many cameras today, required an extended offline training time at an order of weeks up until 2006, with a recent dramatic improvement to 13 hours that was reported in 2007. Minh Tri’s method not only further reduces this training time to only 3 hours, but the computation time is also strongly sublinear to the number of features used. This means that many more features can be used with little increases in training time, yielding a significant improvement in accuracy at low cost. Minh Tri was approached by many researchers requesting for source code after his talk; a free release is planned for early next year.
SCE faculty & PhD student awarded MERLION Grant 2007 (Aug 2007)
| Félicitations! (Congratulations in French) |
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| Navin (left) with his PhD supervisor Ast/P Prasad. |
In promoting and fostering greater collaboration between research institutes in Singapore and France, the Science and Higher Education Section of the Embassy of France in Singapore started the MERLION programme in December 2005 to give support to joint scientific and technological projects.
This year, there were a total of 49 proposals contesting for the MERLION project grant, worth 15,000 Euros each. The projects “3D Video-based Human Motion Capture” and “An architectural framework for dynamically reconfigurable low power software defined radio handset” submitted respectively by SCE Chair A/P Seah Hock Soon and Ast/P Vinod Prasad were among the 15 successful projects. These projects were stringently selected based on their scientific quality, originality and methodology of the project, expertise of both the French and Singaporean partners, scientific and economic impact and applications, amongst the many other criteria.
Ast/P Prasad’s PhD student Navin Michael who works with him on the same project was also awarded one of the 6 MERLION PhD grants. Their project partner, France’s institute Supélec, is a leading institute in the field of electrical engineering and computer science. Navin will be fully sponsored to spend almost half of his PhD duration in Supélec.
The award ceremony was held on 3 August at the French Embassy.
SCE Congratulates its Graduates of Class 2007 (July 2007)
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| Proud graduates of SCE. |
525 graduates marched joyously out of SCE this year as promising young men and women. Significant was that the group included our pioneer batch of Computer Science students celebrating the completion of a rigorous and enriching progamme which started in 2004.
The convocation ceremony for the Class of 2007 was held on 27 July 2007. As the graduates sang along to the tune of “Friends Forever”, it closes a memorable chapter of their lives in SCE, but at the same time a new passageway is opened. We are confident our graduates will find many opportunities and successes on this new path.
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University scholar Tran Bao Duy (centre) with SCE’s A/P Hui Siu Cheung (left) and his senior high school teacher Mr Hoang Ngoc Hung.
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University scholar Ding Ling (centre) with SCE's A/P Man Zhihong (left) and her high school teacher Ms Chen Yi.
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To recognize outstanding students and teaching excellence, NTU launches the University Scholars Award. Students who win this award will honour a NTU faculty member and a teacher from his/her junior college, polytechnic, or equivalent institution. Among the 18 winners are SCE’s Ding Ling and Tran Bao Duy. The NTU faculty members acknowledged by them are A/P Man Zhihong and A/P Hui Siu Cheung respectively. Both Ding Ling and Tran Bao Duy are grateful for their inspirational teaching and unfaltering mentorship to bring them to where they are now.
Indeed, students and faculty members are at the heart of SCE, they are the ones who break the trails and set the tracks. To the graduates: Go on and take on the world. In your pursuit of success, do remember your alma mater and stay in touch with us.
Best Paper Award at ICDCS 2007 (Jun 2007)
Asst Prof Anwitaman Datta and collaborators, Professors Ion Stoica and Mike Franklin from UC Berkeley, won the best paper award at the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2007) in June 2007 at Ontario, Canada. ICDCS is an IEEE Computer Society sponsored premier conference with a wide coverage of topics in Distributed Computing and has a long history of significant achievements and worldwide visibility.
The team commenced work in 2005 on a new genre of overlay based multicast network for disseminating information from popular but resource constrained content/information sources. This communication primitive called Latency Gradated Overlay (LagOver) considers scenarios where information consumers self-organise themselves according to their individual resource constraints – for example, bandwidth which individual participants can and are willing to contribute; and the latency they are willing to tolerate based on their personal needs and requirements in receiving the information from the source.
Such a communication primitive finds immediate use in applications such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds aggregation in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner.
The Credibles took 2nd place in ThinkQuest (Jun 2007)
Sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation, ThinkQuest is a web design competition that offers a unique project-based learning experience for students across the globe to work in teams to build innovative and educational websites.
Taking the 2nd place for the under 19 category, The Credibles comprises 3 SCE students, namely Sparsh Agarwal, Devayan Mallick, and Pranav Ramkumar, as well as students from Nanyang Business School, Georgia Tech, USA, IIT Madras, India, and Institute of Technology, Indonesia. The team built a website that deals with the credibility of information on the Internet and combines leading-edge design with useful content.
The award ceremony will be held in San Francisco on 14 November 2007.
Two-time Champ at ACM International Collegiate Programming Regional Contest (Dec 2006)
The team comprises (L-R) Bramandia, Ardian,
and Ainun.
Mr Kevin Jones led the SCE team to the top in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Regional Contest. But the glory while great is only a repeat performance of SCE’s triumph in 2005, when it also emerged tops in the same regional competition, earning it its 29th place world ranking. The glory for this year is really our team managing to crack all nine problems in the competition, a first for the championships, never achieved before. The worldwide championships are competitive and demanding. Not for nothing are they described as the Olympics of Programming. Only eighty-eight teams out of 6,099 teams have advanced to the World Finals. Our SCE team will be the sole Singapore representative at the finals in March 2007 in Tokyo – another glory?
Winner at Vietnamese Intellect 2006 (Dec 2006)
Vuong Ba Quy
The term mathematical expressions may be Greek to many but not to final year SCE student Vuong Ba Quy because it was his final year project subject which won the top prize in Vietnamese Intellect 2006, an annual prestigious software contest for youth. Vuong can enjoy a cash prize of $4,350, and a laptop.
Media Coverage
Best Paper Award at VIP 2006 (Nov 2006)
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| From left: A/P Chan Syin, Wang Huan, Liu Song and A/P Clement Chia. |
The paper “Does Ontology help in Image Retrieval?” won the Best Paper Award (sponsored by Nokia) at the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Visual Information Processing (VIP 2006) held in Beijing in November. Authored by PhD student Wang Huan and Liu Song, with supervisors A/P Clement Chia and A/P Chan Syin, the paper presented several approaches for image retrieval. They experimented with text vector approach, moved on to text description ontology approach, and finally to multi-modality ontology approach. They then compared the results with Google Image Retrieval and the observations have helped to answer the question “Does ontology help in image retrieval?”.
Budding SCE Engineers at MotoDev Competition (Oct 2006)
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(L-R): Hui Ling, Gabriel and Sek Boon walked away with $1000 cash and a plaque.
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A group shot for the 2nd runner-up and category winner.
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2 groups of SCE students took part in Motorola’s MotoDev J2ME Developers Competition 2006 and displayed commendable performance. This was a 3-month long competition for all tertiary students, receiving more than 100 entries.
One of the teams that comprised third year students Gabriel Tay Jiawen, Peh Sek Boon and Tan Hui Ling clinched the 2nd runner-up position with their project BuSmart. BuSmart is a public bus directory mobile application that provides user with current public bus service information in Singapore, as well as online news and traffic updates, and advertisements. This useful application is easily accessible to anyone who has a mobile phone.
The other team consisting of first year students Eugene Tan Jie Ming and Teo Wen Qiang was the winner for the New Economy Application category. They developed iNmap (interactive NTU map) which supersedes the limitations of conventional maps by providing more detailed information such as the location of each tutorial room, or the shortest route to the user’s destination.
Gabriel is planning to set up a SCE Mobile Application Developer Club to serve as a platform for like-minded course mates to exchange and share experience in the area of mobile application development.
Dr Tay – Excellent in Teaching (Oct 2006)
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| President Su (left) presenting the award to Dr Tay at the Faculty & Staff Dinner. |
In October, Dr Alex Tay was awarded the prestigious Nanyang Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest accolade given by the university to faculty who are passionate and committed towards teaching.
Winning the award for the first time since Dr Tay started teaching in 2001, he said, “When I was young, I was a weak student who had difficulty understanding lessons. It was not until university days when I met professors who provided the knowledge, passion and motivation to extend my horizons. This motivated me to learn, explore and finally doing exceptionally well for my first degree. Through that experience, I understand the need to provide the sparks to ignite a student’s passion for learning.”
Dr Tay is also in the SCE Career Guidance Committee. His enthusiasm is clearly displayed when he relentlessly explains and counsels students on what path they should take in their course of study and/or career choice.
Kudos to Dr Tay! May more SCE students be inspired by you.
SCE Women grace prestigious women’s conference (Oct 2006)
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| Neha and Ding Ling at the conference: Sharing knowledge with about 1300 women from academia, industry and government |
The prestigious Grace Hopper Conference 2006 in San Diego, California, had direct contact with the talents and brilliance of SCE, in particular, its women, when Neha Chachra, Ding Ling and Priyanka Gupta hit its shores. These three outstanding students were awarded the Global Community Scholarship sponsored by Google and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. They were among 83 scholarship recipients selected from a pool of 550 applicants worldwide. An exhilarated Neha highlighted the scoop of such an award: “It was a remarkable experience coming in touch with some of the most established women in computing and to know about the on-going research in some of the finest institutions in the world. I am very proud to have represented my university.” The Grace Hopper Conference is the world’s premier gathering of women in computing and is designed to propel the research and career interests of women in computing to the frontline. The Anita Borg Institute is an international organisation that aims to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and in turn to ensure the positive impact of technology on women.
Runner-up for Best Student Paper Award at ICONIP 2006 (Oct 2006)
In the recent 13th International Conference on Neural Information Processing held in Hong Kong, PhD student Arun Kumar nabbed the runner-up position for Best Student Paper Award. The winning paper “Detection of brain activation from functional MR images using power spectral density” was written together with supervisor A/P Jagath Rajapakse.
In the paper, Arun & A/P Rajapakse presented an efficient method for detecting activation on single and multiple cycle functional MRI (fMRI) data based on a hidden Markov model using power spectral density vectors. Their method demonstrated the efficacy to detect brain activations by using both synthetic and real fMRI data.
Most Cited Scientist (Oct 2006)
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| A/P Jagath Rajapakse |
SCE’s A/P Jagath Rajapakse is among the most cited scientists of all fields for the period 1996 – 2006. So says Thomson ISI Web of Science. The Web of Science is a platform that provides seamless access to current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from approximately 8,700 of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world.
A visiting professor at the Biological Engineering Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, A/P Rajapakse’s research investigates human brain function, using imaging techniques and bioinformatics, leading to new drugs and behavioral or stem cell therapies for brain disease. He has authored over 200 research publications in refereed journals, books, and conference proceedings, in the fields of brain imaging, computational biology, and machine learning.
8th Hitachi Youth Leadership Initiative (Sept 2006)
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| Vincent Chow |
SCE is proud of final year student Vincent Chow whom with three others will be representing Singapore in the 8th Hitachi Youth Leadership Initiative (HYLI), an annual Asian student leaders conference. Hitachi organises this major regional community programme to contribute to the development of next generation leaders in Asia. Student leaders enjoy different country venues every year as the backdrop to key discussion of regional or global issues, while also enjoying interaction among themselves and with the local community.
Vincent is working on his paper “What China and India's Development Can Bring to Asia”. He will be presenting his views in Hanoi, Vietnam in January 2007. The HYLI originated in 1996.
Microsoft Research Asia 2006 Fellowship Award (Aug 2006)
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| 2006 MSRA Fellow – He Qi |
A SCE student has scooped the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Award, making it the 2nd consecutive year SCE has made a strong impression with its research quality. PhD student He Qi was backed up by good publication records, writing and presentation skills, with an intriguing research area of Multi-lingual Anticipatory Event Detection.
14 researchers and research managers reviewed a total of 63 applications, making this year’s event the stiffest competition so far. With guidance from A/P Lim Ee Peng and Ast/P Chang Kuiyu, He Qi hopes to use his award on an internship with Microsoft Research Asia sometime early next year.
The annual Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program began in 1999 to support talented PhD students such as He Qi, who demonstrate potential for research leadership. Besides the honour of the award, there is also a cash prize, a plaque and an attachment with Microsoft Research Asia Lab in Beijing for a period of 3 to 6 months.
SCE’s research recognised at US SIGKDD 2006 (Aug 2006)
The ACM SIGKDD is respected as the most prestigious conference in the arena of data mining research, and at the recent 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD 2006), in Philadelphia, USA, A/P Sourav S Bhowmick with his PhD student Zhao Qiankun, gained distinction with their paper, “Event Detection from the Evolution of Click-Through Data” by winning the ACM Student Travel Award. A collaborative effort with Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, A/P Bhowmick, Zhao, along with T-Y Liu and W-Y Ma (from Microsoft Research Asia) investigated a novel approach that would detect events from search engine log data by analysing the evolution pattern of the data. Such knowledge of events finds use in several applications such as event-based advertisement, event directory, event-based search results, and web-based event alert system.
Speaking about the award, A/P Bhowmick noted that “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a full research paper from NTU is accepted in SIGKDD. The acceptance rate of full research papers in SIGKDD is 11% this year. The Student Travel Award is presented to selected papers whose first author is a student.”
Congratulations to Zhao who received a certificate, a sum of 500 USD, and free registration with the SIGKDD.
National Day Honours for SCE Faculty (Aug 2006)
Two SCE faculty received national recognition for their outstanding contributions to Singapore education by being awarded the National Day Awards, the Public Administration Medal.
Congratulations to Professor Angela Goh and Professor Thambipillai Srikanthan! Both have excelled in teaching, research, and administration, bringing honor to SCE in many ways, besides being respected and loved by students and peers. Prof Goh was awarded the Silver Medal and Prof Sri received the Bronze Medal. Prof Goh is SCE’s Vice-Dean (Academic) who also teaches. She wants to bring attention to the “many others in NTU who are dedicated and have worked hard”, and conveys her appreciation and gratitude to everyone who has given her help. She states “the award belongs to all my colleagues who have assisted me in one way or another.”
Heading the Centre for High Performance Embedded Systems and the Intelligent Devices & Systems Cluster, Prof Sri has dedicated more than 15 years to education in Singapore, and has also made significant contributions towards advancing research in embedded systems.
UK-Singapore Partners in Science Collaboration Awards (July 2006)
Some lucky SCE faculty staff will soon be able to enjoy Merry England through overseas travel grants awarded by the British High Commission, as part of the UK-Singapore Partners in Science Collaboration initiative. The lucky seven are A/P Francis Lee, A/P Alvis Fong, A/P Alexei Sourin, Ast/P Malcolm Low, Ast/P Ong Yew Soon, Ast/P Vinod A Prasad and Ast/P Miao Chunyan. They will spend time with potential overseas partner institutions to explore and share research visions, obtain insights into existing research studies, from which might emerge future collaborative research.
JAL Scholarships for SCE students (July 2006)
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| Zhi Yong (left) and King Sen (right) with classmate Yu Ru whom also won the JAL scholarship. |
Tan Zhi Yong and Chan King Sen Year 2 computer engineering students have bagged two out of three JAL Foundation scholarships.
They now are on the route to future leadership together with other university students from the Asia/Oceania region, enhanced by immersion in Japan, which will help them gain understanding and knowledge of this fascinating culture. This will come about from a 21-day all-expenses-covered stint in Japan, including courses for global citizenship, a research field trip, an Asia Forum in Ishikawa and homestays in Tokyo and Kanazawa.
For the lucky pair, interests in the language started with Japanese dramas. Zhi Yong had started learning Japanese since secondary school days and continued pursuing his interest in NTU by taking it as a general elective. King Sen started learning Japanese in NTU and now has a good grasp of the language. They both intend advancing their studies in Japanese.
PADS 2006 gets SCE Best Paper Award (May 2006)
The 20th ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS) was the scene of triumph for Chen Dan, A/P Stephen J Turner and A/P Cai Wentong when out of 21 other papers, they won the coveted Best Paper Award with “A Framework for Robust HLA-based Distributed Simulations”.
This paper introduced a framework for robust HLA-based distributed simulations using a “Decoupled Federate Architecture”. What this framework does is exploit the architecture to provide a generic fault-tolerant model that uses a “dynamic substitution” approach to deal with failure. It supports reusability of legacy federate code, and is platform-neutral and independent of federate modeling approaches.
Agent ‘Neil’ clinches 2nd place at ART Competition (May 2006)
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| Weng Jianshu at the ART Competition in Future University-Hakodate. |
This agent is no spy but the project developed by SCE PhD student Weng Jianshu and his team members won them second prize at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS) in Hokodate Japan in May this year. Agent ‘Neil’ outdid 19 other research teams from different universities and institutes in the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Competition.
The team was Jianshu, supervisors Prof Angela Goh and Asst Prof Miao Chun Yan from SCE, with Dr. Shen Zhiqi and Prof Robert Gay from Information Communication Institute of Singapore at NTU School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering. The trust and reputation evaluation metrics used by ‘Neil’ will be further applied to a A*Star-funded national research project.
Data Mining Gets Competitive at PAKDD 2006 (Apr 2006)
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| From left to right: IDA Assistant Chief Executive Mr Khoong Hock Yun, Mr Hanny Yulius Limanto and Dr Tay Joc Cing. |
The 10th PAKDD 2006 (Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) together with SAS (Singapore Institute of Statistics and the Pattern Recognition & Machine Intelligence Association of Singapore) opened data mining to the field of champions when they hosted a data mining competition in the first quarter of the year.
Participating teams had to solve a classification problem with the objective to accurately predict some customer data for a telco operator. SCE 4th year student Hanny Yulius Limanto together with Dr Tay Joc Cing, an SCE staff, and Dr Andrew Watkins from Mississippi State University emerged as the Champions in the University Category. The team made use of an immune-system-inspired data mining algorithm to predict the data.
Ardian – A Champ again at Google India Code Jam 2006 (Apr 2006)
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| Ardian – The Google Champ. |
Ardian (centre) with 2nd and 3rd prize winners. |
The 2006 Google India Code Jam competition attracted more than 14,000 programmers from India and South East Asia. After an initial rigorous qualifying round, 500 proceeded to round two. The top 50 scorers from this flew to Bangalore for the Grand Finals.
Ardian Kristanto Poernomo, SCE Year 4 undergraduate, repeated his glorious win as Champion last year, when he was crowned the Champion again this year. He humbly states ‘Indeed I am very happy! This year’s competition is much tougher than last year as many participants have become better. Even until the last minute I wasn’t sure if I could win… I was very lucky.’
Also from SCE, Nguyen Phuong Ngoc and Prima Chairunnanda came in fourth and fifth respectively in this competition.
Ardian received a cash prize of Rs 122,000, while Phuong Ngoc and Prima received Rs 56,000 each.
SCE at Discover Engineering@NTU 2006 (Mar 2006)
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| Event committee chairman, A/P Lee Keok Kee, (left) explaining a project to a visitor. |
Hands-on experience helps in understanding computing. |
Held on 11 March 2006 at the Nanyang Auditorium, Discover Engineering@NTU called on all engineering schools in NTU to display interesting exhibits and showcase research projects to the public, especially to budding A-level and polytechnic students who would like to explore engineering studies.
A friendly competition was conducted between the engineering schools on that day. Visitors were asked to vote for the Most Popular Research Project, Most Popular Undergraduate Project, and Most Popular Nanyang Research Program Project.
SCE won the first and second prizes in the Most Popular Undergraduate Project category
- 1st: Ast/P Miao Chun Yan, Abhinav Agrawal and Weng Jianshu (Project title: Multi Agent System for Interactive Lab)
- 2nd: Ast/P Franklin Fu, Cheok Meeau Chin, Lee Ri Kang Kelvin, Lin Jiating Justin, Koh Hong Hui, Nguyen Hoang Anh and Ong Sze Wee Francis (Project title: Faculty Mining via SIMPLICITY)
For Most Popular Nanyang Research Program Project, SCE teams came in first and third
- 1st: Li Fang, Choon Kean Fatt, Tejas Shikhare and Victor Chan
(Project title: Palmprint Classification)
- 3rd: Ast/P Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan, Swati Gupta and Zhiren Yang
(Project title: OLAP Reporting Tool for Mobile Clients)
The Discover Engineering@NTU 2006 committee was chaired by SCE’s A/P Lee Keok Kee who, together with his committee members, contributed greatly to the success of this event.