Showcase at World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2022 – Hong Kong Branch

CIMDA participated in the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2022 – Hong Kong Branch held at the Hong Kong Science Park on 1 September. Many scientists, scholars, investors, and government officials gathered to discuss cutting-edge topics at this world-class AI event, and it was a pleasure to be invited to showcase our innovations at the interactive exhibition zone alongside other industry professionals.

We were delighted to introduce our AI and data analysis applications including Tensor Computing, Face Image Analysis, Sports Video Analysis, Digital Entertainment, and Biomedical Data Analysis to other researchers and AI companies. Centre Director Professor Hong Yan was present at the event and met with many top-notch professionals from all over the world to exchange experience and thoughts on the latest AI developments. We were able to explore possible collaboration opportunities through these fruitful discussions and inspire one another with our passion and ideas for technology.

We hope to share our technology and innovative ideas with many more people in the coming events!

Knowledge Exchange with Tertiary Students 2022

This summer, ten interns from CityU, UST and VTC joined CIMDA to turn their school knowledge into actual, hands-on experience by supporting and contributing to our Centre from a multitude of angles.

During the internship, they explored machine learning, motion capture, real-time video analysis, and 3D modelling applications with the support and guides provided by our researchers and programmers.

We are also glad to receive another young talent, Sean, who was admitted by CityU's intelligent manufacturing engineering programme at the young age of only 13. He visits our Centre regularly to expand his knowledge and experience in practical programming and to have research exchange with our colleagues.

We appreciate all their dedicated contributions, and it has been delightful for us to see the progress and achievements they have made at our Centre. These students all carry the potential to become the social pillars of STEM and we wish them all the best in the future.

Click HERE to see the sharing of some of the students.

Showcase at Golden Age Expo & Summit 2022

CIMDA participated in the 7th Golden Age Expo & Summit 2022 (GAES) held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre over 5-7 August (Fri–Sun), where entrepreneurs and renowned organizations alike gather to exhibit their latest technology and innovative solutions catered to the ageing industry.

We were excited to have been able to introduce our AI-based Pose Estimation Technology along with our new Elderly-assisting System, CIMDA Care in an open-event. CIMDA Care is an assistance program designed to bring function and entertainment together for elderlies, providing reminders, exercise guidance, media entertainment and an AI-based chat function in an all-in-one platform.

Due to its versatile and compact design, it has garnered the interests of not only the general public or elderlies in need, but also professionals within the field who are seeking cooperation with research and IT professionals to provide them with the technological means currently necessary in the market for elderly care.

The Centre Director Professor Hong Yan attended on the first day and was able to share some thoughts and insights on his innovations with many industry professionals in person.

We encountered many of our close partners and friends during the event, and it has also given CIMDA the opportunity to meet many new research centres and companies who share the same goals and are seeking future collaborations.

We look forward to sharing even more of our innovations in our next exhibit!

Presentation of Sports Data Analysis during Zoom Webinar with Education Bureau

The Education Bureau held an online Zoom webinar today on The Integration of PE and STEM Education where over 200 teachers, researchers and other education alumni participated and shared insights on the implementation of AI into sports education to assist both students and related teaching staff.

Professor Hong Yan, the Centre Director, gave an in-depth presentation on AI-based Runner Identification Technology and Entertainment Systems, where through the combination of sports science, AI and entertainment, we can enhance and encourage students’ performances and help alleviate workload for teachers. The system utilizes machine-learning, bib number recognition and pose estimation to accurately identify students apart to give them individual assessments for their performance, as well as personalized suggestions for practice and training. This not only aids our younger generation in their development by providing instant feedback for improvement and motivation, but also reduces extra work for teachers as the entire process is fast and automatic.

Together with Dr. Victor Lau, the Associate Director of the Knowledge Transfer Office of City University of Hong Kong and Mr. Tam Chi-Chung of the Chinese YMCA College, they have also discussed the use of “Smart Track” and “Heart Rate Monitoring System” to boost efficiency in conducting aerobic exercises during PE classes, and how to make the overall learning experience more fulfilling and worthwhile for students and teachers altogether.

Attendees of the seminar have shown deep interest and brought up questions towards the end where we had the chance to elaborate further and discuss the possibilities of potential collaborations with other institutions and industries who may also benefit from our technology. It was both a valuable sharing and learning experience for all participants and we look forward to participating in more events in the near future.

Congratulations to Professor Min Xie for Being Elected as a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts

We are delighted to announce that Professor Min Xie, our programme leader and board member, has been elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA).

As the Chair Professor of the Department of Advanced Design and Systems Engineering, and the School of Data Science at CityU, Professor Xie has carried out extensive research in reliability, quality control, industrial statistics, and systems engineering. He has published over 300 journal papers and co-authored ten books. There have been over 60 PhD students under his supervision, and they hold various positions and contribute to academia, industry, and financial institutions. In 2006, Professor Xie was elected IEEE Fellow for his contribution to systems and software reliability.

The title of EASA member is a recognition of Professor Xie for his distinctive achievements and contributions to science and society. “I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Sweden. I feel blissful to be recognized by a European academy,” expressed Professor Xie.

European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA) is under the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP)'s umbrella. This big umbrella builds a global network of over 140 national and regional member academies of science, engineering and medicine, while EASA runs as a non-profit learned society of scientists and artists founded in Salzburg, Austria, in 1990. Being one of the high-level and recognized academies, EASA serves as a transnational and interdisciplinary network to connect about 2000 elected members worldwide, including 34 Nobel Prize laureates.

Meeting Hi-tech Professionals at the Federation of Hong Kong Industries

Right before Christmas Eve, Professor Hong Yan, Ms Gloria Lee and Ms Carol Ng from CIMDA were invited and attended a meeting with the experts and leaders from Hong Kong’s AI and Robotics industries at the Federation of Hong Kong Industries’ office (FHKI) on 23 December.

The meeting was hosted by the AI and Robotics Alliance of Hong Kong (AIRAHK), a committee set up under the Innovation and Technology Development Committee (ITDC) of FHKI. Aiming to create synergy among the AI and Robotics community in the city and bring together the stakeholders, the meeting has successfully linked up research centres from the AIR@InnoHK Clusters to discuss and explore the commercialization opportunities FHKI can bring.

In the meeting, CIMDA met up with the local peer AI and Robotics research centres and companies to share and exchange experiences running hi-tech businesses in Hong Kong. We look forward to participating in more of these activities with the industry players in the coming year to further enhance and develop the AI and hi-tech industries in Hong Kong!

Congratulations to Professor Hong Yan for Being Elected Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors

We are proud and delighted to share with you a piece of excellent news that Professor Hong Yan, our Centre Director, has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow 2021.

Professor Yan and his research team have inventions across interdisciplinary areas. The real-world application of their creations also received tremendous attention with awards and licenses. For example, Professor Yan's real-time lip-synchronization and facial animation system won the Best Mobile Entertainment Software Award in Hong Kong. The system has also been licensed to multiple telecommunications companies for multimedia message services for local and overseas markets.

Being elected NAI Fellow is a recognition of Professor Yan as a genuinely prolific academic innovator who has made a tangible impact on society's quality of life, economic development, and welfare with his outstanding inventions.

"It is a great honour for my research group. It will encourage us to achieve new heights in our interdisciplinary R&D work." – Professor Hong Yan.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is a U.S. based member organization composed of international universities, governmental institutes and NGO research centres. The status of elected NAI fellows represents the highest professional distinction, and it will only be accorded to academic inventors.

You may visit HERE to learn more about this marvellous news about Professor Yan.

Awarded in ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2021

Congratulations to Xinqi Fan, Ali Shahid, and Hong Yan for winning the Second Place in the Facial Micro-Expression Generation Task during the ACM Multimedia 2021 - Multimedia Grand Challenge!

The team has successfully found an effective method to capture subtle changes in facial expressions by learning landmarks in a self-supervised manner and generating dense motion between reference and desired images. Their winning paper, Facial Micro-Expression Generation based on Deep Motion Re-targeting and Transfer Learning, demonstrates how to solve the lack of training data and apply deep transfer learning by borrowing knowledge from macro-expression generation. The team has also received good results on several facial expression datasets.

ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society which delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM Multimedia has been the worldwide premier conference and a key world event where professionals display their scientific achievement and innovative industrial products.

You may visit the link HERE for watching the team's presentation video of their paper.

Recruitment Talk for HKUST Students

CIMDA is recruiting!

Professor Hong Yan gave an online recruitment talk on ZOOM to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology students from different schools, including Engineering, Science, Business and Management Studies and more.

In the talk, Professor Yan introduced the R&D focus of our Centre and shared the prospects of our business projects with the application of advanced AI technologies and Data Science developed by our Centre's members.

There are a lot of exciting studies and projects happening here in our friendly office at the Hong Kong Science Park, and more to come for sure!

We will hold another online recruitment talk to the City University of Hong Kong students on 29th October 2021. Details will be available on CityU's website soon.

You may also click on the poster on the left to learn more about the details of the vacancies.

We look forward to seeing you then, ciao!

Professor Yan Delivers a Talk on Co-Clustering in the Oxford DataSig Seminar Series

Professor Hong Yan gave a presentation on “Co-clustering Analysis of Multidimensional Big Data” in the Oxford DataSig Seminar Series. Co-clustering is a method of unsupervised machine learning. It can extract and analyse coherent patterns in large multidimensional data arrays. Professor Yan’s group has developed tensor and hyperplane-based models for co-clustering. They are granted a US patent and have published numerous papers in leading research journals.

In the seminar, Professor Yan explained co-clustering theories and computer algorithms and demonstrated their applications to genomic data analysis, protein structure prediction, drug therapeutic effect assessment, cell imaging, and facial expression recognition.

At the end of the seminar, Professor Yan and Professor Lyons announced that there would be more joint seminars between Oxford and CIMDA to encourage collaborations. Students will have the chance to take the stage and present their academic findings to the audience from around the globe.

If you missed the online seminar, you could visit the link here to see its record and presentation slides.

The DataSıg programme is organized by world-class scholars from leading universities and research institutions, such as Oxford University, The Alan Turing Institute and UCL. “It is looking at further developing fundamental, signature-based mathematical tools and introducing them to contexts where it is possible to achieve significant outcomes.” DataSıg holds online seminar series discussing topics of data science.

Undergraduate Internship 2021

This summer, we are delighted to have nine talented undergraduate students from the CityU to join us as our interns. They are all specialized in different subjects with their backgrounds from the College of Science, College of Engineering, and School of Creative Media.

The two-month programme provides the interns with opportunities to explore motion capture, machine learning, computer vision, Smart City, WebGL, OpenGL, Vulkan, and other technology research through practical work and training. We appreciate their contributions to our Centre.

We can also see that the interns have gained hands-on experience by applying their school knowledge to their daily duties at the actual workplace with our Centre's supervision. We hope that they will equip themselves with a clear vision of what to expect in reality after graduation or be more prepared for future studies.

We wish them all the best in the future.

Click HERE to see the sharings of some of our interns.

Welcome Professor Liqun Qi

Professor Liqun Qi from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University will visit our Centre for two weeks.

Professor Qi, a highly cited and renowned mathematician, has published more than 360 research papers in international journals. He established the superlinear and quadratic convergence theory of the Semismooth Newton Method. He also plays a principal role in the development of reformulation methods in optimization. In 2005, Professor Qi pioneered the research on eigenvalues for higher order tensors, which now has applications in biomedical engineering, statistical data analysis, machine learning, spectral hypergraph theory, solid mechanics, quantum physics, etc. He has more than 120 papers on tensors, published in international journals. His book Tensor Analysis: Spectral Theory and Special Tensors was published in April 2017 by SIAM; another book of his Tensor Eigenvalues and Their Applications was published in 2018 by Springer.

Professor Qi will collaborate with CIMDA researchers on tensor computing and quaternion optimization and their applications to signal and image processing and computer animation.

New Research Projects

Congratulations to the following Centre members, who are successful with their applications for General Research Funding from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council:

Dr Yanni Sun, “Strain-level Composition Analysis for RNA Viruses”

Professor Min Xie, “New Approaches for Reliability Analysis of Industrial Systems Subject to Multivariate Degradation”

Professor Hong Yan, “Matching Large Feature Sets based on Hypergraph Models and Structurally Adaptive CUR Decompositions of Compatibility Tensors”

Dr Yixuan Yuan, “From Source-available to Source-free Unsupervised Prototypical Domain Adaptation for Lesion Segmentation”

Professor Moshe Zukerman, “Scalable Optimized Design of Multi-layered Network Slicing and Virtual Network Embedding Under Long Range Dependent Traffic and Flexi-grid Optical Transmission with Adaptive Modulation”

Inno² Grand Opening cum Welcoming Party

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks held the Inno² Grand Opening cum Welcoming Party with its new tenants of large research centres.

Professor Hong Yan, CIMDA’s Director, and Ms. Carol Ng, Senior Administrative Officer, were invited for their participation. They were pleased to meet leading researchers, venture capitalists, business leaders, and government office representatives. It was a perfect opportunity for us to connect with them and share our passion and views about cutting-edge R&D activities, industry collaboration, knowledge transfer, and hi-technology businesses.

CIMDA’s Office Warming Party

Our office has recently moved to the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks. On 17 June, we held an office warming party with all the Centre members. The party kicked started with our Centre Director Professor Hong Yan’s toast, in which we marked our vision and mission together for the future of CIMDA. Professor Yan thanked all colleagues for their contributions during the renovation period, which made it possible for us to work in a beautiful new office with spectacular outside views through the windows.

Professor Yan told the attendees that “this is only our first party at the Centre, but I’m already thinking of planning a future much bigger party when we have a spin-off company listed in the stock market.” It drew much cheer and enthusiasm for all the Centre members.

Professor Sam Kwong Wins a Major Award on Video Coding Technology

Congratulations to Professor Sam Kwong for winning a major award from the Ministry of Education on his research work on “High-efficiency Computing Theory and Method for Video Coding”.

Video coding is a technology to reduce the amount of data for video storage and transmission and it has many applications in computer, communications, and internet systems. Professor Kwong and his collaborators have developed an advanced video coding method that can provide a large data compression ratio and a high video quality.

More information about this award can be found on:

https://www.cityu.edu.hk/media/press-release/2021/06/06/two-outstanding-research-projects-clinch-major-ministry-education-awards

Invited Speech on AI by Professor Hong Yan to Gifted Students

Professor Hong Yan delivered an invited speech on “Artificial Intelligence: History, Current Status, and Future Opportunities and Challenges” to over 100 gifted high school students. He provided a review of the historical development of AI-related technologies, including reasoning, optimization, expert systems, multi-layer perceptrons and deep learning, and their applications to natural language processing, speech and image pattern recognition, computer vision, and decision making. Professor Yan shared his experience learning LISP and solving the blocks world problem from his student’s time. Besides, he also presented his groups’ current work on object tracking and recognition, co-clustering, tensor computing, cell imaging, and analysis of lung cancer drug resistance.

Professor Yan pointed out that current methods in AI, especially for deep learning, can be used to solve a wide range of real-world problems. However, there are also many challenges ahead. He showed an interesting example of recognizing the number “8” with different shapes and styles. It is infeasible to collect enough training samples for all these variations using the current data fitting-based classifier design methodologies. He encouraged students to gain knowledge in related areas, such as mathematics, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience, have a good understanding of basic principles, not to shy away from complex problems, go beyond existing technologies, and develop radically new ones.