The Faculty of Engineering showcased five students and professors innovations at the 47th Joint School Science Exhibition from 22 to 27 August in the exhibition gallery of the Hong Kong Public Library.

With the theme of “Household redesigned, Science redefined”, the event provided a platform for sharing innovative ideas from young people who use their knowledge of science to envision a bold world that promises better quality of life. The selected five projects that could have made a strong impact in everyday life include AI model car, lip language recognition (Best Project Award of Undergraduate Summer Research Internship), AuthPaper which tackle forgery (Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Award 2013), automatic transporter (Champion in the third Greater China Design Competiton), and 'Lab-on-a-disc (LOAD) Platform – Bioassay Automation' which is able to simplify complex DNA assay and allergen testing procedures to one single step, and results will be available within an hour on-site.

Dean’s Welcoming Speech
TY Wong Hall
Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building
1 September 2014

Fellow students:

It is my great pleasure to welcome you all in the Faculty welcome reception. First of all, congratulations! Congratulate on entering CUHK, a top and comprehensive University in Hong Kong, congratulate on entering our faculty, where you can achieve your highest potential.

Today is your first day in University, which is also one of the most special and remarkable times in your life. University presents a fascinating life ahead. There is a vast array of courses that you can enroll, there are abundant student societies that you can join and there are a lot of college activities that await your participation. To a freshman like you, everything is new, everything is interesting. Some of you may feel very excited while some of you may feel overwhelmed. To maximize time use, you’d better plan your schedule before school starts. Better still, spend some time to set your goals and spend some time to plan for the coming years, think about what you want to achieve in these few years. After all, four years are really short. Set your goals high and never underestimate your capability.

Good time management and self-motivation are keys to success. Although participating in student and college activities is a good experience, you have to spend your time wisely. Strike a balance between studying and socializing. Do not spend too much time in those activities and neglect your studies. It is perhaps tempting to enjoy the moment and to have fun with friends, rather than working hard on your studies. But if you work hard enough, you will find engineering is actually much more interesting than the society activities. More importantly, success does not come without hard work and the few years at university go very quickly. If you do NOT want to end up being mediocre, study hard. If you want to have a fruitful university life, study hard. If you want to have a rewarding career, study hard.


As I said, although our engineering programmes are challenging, they are also very rewarding. You can make a world of difference with your engineering skills. Let us have a look at the NAE Grand Challenges for the 21st century and you will get a glimpse of what great things you can achieve when you become an engineer.

However, before you can solve the grand challenges, you have to deal with the basics first. In order to grasp the advanced physics, math, biology, chemistry, IT, etc. that are consisted in our programmes, you have to spend time to study, reflect and think. It is important to build a solid understanding of all the fundamentals. Do not just memorize your lecture notes. Be more serious at class and ask more critical questions. Our teachers aim at inspiring you to think and find out the solutions by yourselves instead of just bombarding you with text book materials. Please do ask them questions when you don’t understand any of your lecture materials. They are there to help.

Besides learning the fundamentals, it is also very important to do undergraduate research. It trains you to be innovative and independent. The Faculty has an Undergraduate Summer Research Internship Programme that you should take advantage of. Prof. Michael Cheng will introduce this programme later.

Some of you get very good entrance grades in secondary school whereas some of you may not. But entrance grade is really not that important. We are here to have a fresh start. Another key to success is to work hard and work smart. Hard work bears fruits and those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. Do not give up easily when you find the courses difficult. When you run into problems, make sure you get proper help as soon as possible. Each of you has been assigned an adviser. Do contact them when you have problems. All our tutors and professors are willing and ready to help. If there are difficulties too great that your advisers can’t solve, you may find your department chairman, the associate deans or me. I’ll introduce them later.

You are lucky that CUHK is a comprehensive University, which offers courses from a lot of different fields. You are encouraged to broaden your views by taking elective courses, such as humanities, philosophy, etc. while focusing on your engineering and science core courses or electives. You are also encouraged to take part in the work- study or exchange programmes or undergraduate research that our faculty offers. All these would help develop your skills and raise your competitiveness.

Last but not least, I would like to share a meaningful Chinese proverb with you from <禮記.中庸>: 博學之, 審問之, 慎思之, 明辨之, 篤行之, which means to learn from a variety of places, to ask until you satisfy your desire to learn, to reflect meticulously, to distinguish clearly and to manifest that things you have learnt.


I hope all of you will graduate with flying colours and become an engineer with deep and broad knowledge. Remember to work hard and aim high. Never underestimate your own ability and go for your passion.

A CUHK research team led by Prof. Xiaoou Tang, Professor, Department of Information Engineering, and Prof. Xiaogang Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Electronic Engineering, has built a novel facial recognition system that with the highest accuracy in the world. While humans recognize faces at an accuracy rating of 97.53% on Labeled Faces in the Wild, the recognition system developed by CUHK was tested using thousands of picture sets, and it can recognize faces at an accuracy of 99.15%, regardless of changes in lighting, make-up and camera angles. This is the first time for computing algorithms to reach human face verification performance on this dataset.

'The key challenge of face recognition is to develop effective feature representations for reducing intra-personal variations while enlarging inter-personal differences,' said Prof. Xiaogang Wang. 'With deep learning, the system is provided much more powerful tools to handle the two types of variations and significantly improves the accuracy of face recognition. This technology has numerous important applications in security, law enforcement, Internet and entertainment.' The system could help law enforcement and security agencies to seek out individuals among a crowd of thousands. Traditional video surveillance can only focus on a small number of objects in a very simple environment. With the new system the users can target thousands of objects in very complex environments.

Deep learning is the biggest breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. It simulates human brain's behaviors by training large scale neural networks from big data based on intensive graphics processing unit (GPU) computing.

Face recognition is one of the most important grand challenges in computer vision and AI. Scientifically, this is also an important benchmark on whether AI can reach the level of human intelligence or even surpass it. The breakthrough achieved by CUHK is a strong evidence that deep learning makes AI possible. It opens the door to many important applications, such as finding terrorists from surveillance videos, recognizing imposters at ATM machines, and automatically tagging face images uploaded to Facebook.

The CUDA Research Center at CUHK

As a pioneer in the field of deep learning, CUHK has been selected as Hong Kong's first NVIDIA[1] CUDA[2] Research Center which aims to prepare researchers, engineers and computer scientists for ground-breaking work using GPU accelerators. Prof. Xiagang Wang is the director of this new CUDA Research Center. CUHK will utilize the facility and technical support provided by NVIDIA to enhance its computing arsenal in the areas of deep learning. With the support of GPU parallel computation systems, researchers at CUHK will continue to develop deep learning technologies and apply them to various computer vision related applications including video surveillance, web scale image and video search, as well as human and computer interaction. The Department of Electronic Engineering at CUHK will also offer a first-ever graduate course on deep learning in the 2014-15 academic year to nurture local talents in GPU related applications.

The new CUDA Research Center at CUHK will provide various facility and technical support for the University to conduct GPU related research activities. CUHK will have priority for pre-release access to hardware and software provided by NVIDIA. Recently, NVIDIA has provided the fastest Tesla cards to support CUHK's research of deep learning on face recognition. It normally takes one month for a central processing unit (CPU) to train a deep neural network for face recognition, while a Tesla K40 GPU can complete the training process within 10 hours. NVIDIA will provide GPU training and education sessions for engineers and researchers at CUHK. The engineers from NVIDIA will help the research groups at CUHK set up the optimal configurations of GPU computing systems for crowd video surveillance and training of deep neural networks. They will also help re-implement the computing algorithms developed by CUHK to improve their efficiency on GPU and make them assessable by other GPU users, which is very important for generating impact of research at CUHK.

[1] About NVIDIA®

NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor that generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles and mobile devices.

[2] About CUDA® (Compute Unified Device Architecture)

CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of GPU. Institutions identified as CUDA Research Centers are doing world-changing research by leveraging CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs.

Prof. Liao Wei-Hsin has been appointed Associate Dean (Student Affairs), effective from 1 August 2014.

Prof. Liao joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at CUHK since 1997, where he is also the founding director of the Smart Materials and Structures Laboratory. He was awarded the Research Excellence Award (2010-2011) of CUHK. He is also an active member of Adaptive Structures & Material Systems (ASMS) Branch of the ASME and the Chair of IEEE Hong Kong Joint Chapter of Robotics, Automation and Control Systems during 2011-13. Prof. Liao received 2012 Chapter of the Year Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures, as well as Smart Materials and Structures. Dr. Liao is a Fellow of ASME, HKIE, and IOP.

Prof. Wong Ching Ping is invited to attend the opening ceremony of the 17th Congress of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the 12th Congress of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) on the 10 June 2014 in Beijing. The congress was attended by more than 1,300 academicians from two institutions, which advise the government and industries on key scientific and technological issues.

President Xi Jinping welcomed academicians and guests from the area of Science and Technology. He encouraged scientists to strive to make important breakthroughs in key technologies, and master crucial technologies into their own hands. Technological innovation is critical to our future. The cultivation of talents should be placed first when it comes to the pursuit of scientific and technological innovation. President remarked the need to reform mechanisms of training, attracting and employing talents and the training of more world-class scientists.

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The Univeristy is pleased to receive from Intel Corporation, the world's largest multinational semiconductor chip maker, a generous donation of a batch of advanced embedded controller development boards and associated software licenses worth HK$14 million. To take forward the collaboration between CUHK and Intel on nurturing embedded systems talents who are in high demand around the world, the 'Intel Embedded Systems Research Center' at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of CUHK has been established. The collaboration will further strengthen CUHK's education and applied research on embedded systems, and inspire students' innovations and interest in technology development. A Plaque Presentation Ceremony of 'Intel Embedded Systems Research Center' was held at CUHK, officiated by Prof. Pak Chung CHING, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Electronic Engineering of CUHK, and Ms. JoZell JOHNSON, Global Higher Education Director, Intel Corporation.

Embedded systems are 'embedded in' our everyday life. They are used to control the operations of numerous electronic applications from mobile phones, traffic lights, electric vehicles to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. An embedded system contains chips with in-built software to perform particular functions. Unlike personal computers that can be programmed to perform general tasks, embedded systems are built inside various installations to control the execution of specific tasks. They must be able to run continuously with high reliability and ability to restore itself. Therefore, engineers of embedded systems need to be very stringent to ensure that the systems are precise and reliable with minimal size and cost.

The 'Intel Embedded Systems Research Center' is led by Prof Terrence MAK Sui Tung, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, CUHK. Students who enroll the course 'Embedded Systems Development and Applications' offered by the Faculty of Engineering will have the chance to use Intel's Atom board and Galileo board available in the Center to explore innovative applications of embedded systems.

Professor Pak Chung CHING said, 'CUHK has always been working closely with the industry so that our research results and students can keep pace with latest development. Innovative electronic products with embedded systems are widely adopted in our daily lives, and demand for high-quality embedded systems engineers has been increasing. We are glad to collaborate with Intel, the global leader in semiconductors and microcontrollers, to nurture talents to stride forward in technology innovations.'
Ms. JoZell JOHNSON remarked, 'Equipping the next generation with the technology and entrepreneurial know-how to improve the world they live in—that's what the Intel Higher Education effort is all about. CUHK students have an impressive record of very outstanding results in Intel Cup*. We are glad to join hands with CUHK to nurture more brilliant winners and innovative talents. On top of the donation, Intel and CUHK will explore further collaboration in curriculum development, joint research, talents cultivation, mentorship, internship and students competitions, etc.'
CUHK research projects on embedded systems

'Quadcoptor' is a final year project of a CUHK undergraduate student. He adopted embedded systems in multi-aircraft controlling, for applications such as inter-communication and maneuverability. Each quadcoptor will carry one device with a specific task, such as video shooting, measuring temperatures, wind speed or pollutants, etc. A squad of quadcoptors can be controlled by one panel to execute different tasks real-time. The data collected from each quadcoptor will be sent to the control panel for analysis. It can be used for monitoring environment, investigation or rescue operations.

Professor MAK is working on a biomedical project 'Neural Recording Machine' with the use of embedded systems. The Neural Recording Machine is able to observe the damage or degeneration of the nervous system caused by various diseases such as epilepsy, Parkinson's and other movement disorders which usually require obtaining a large amount of brain neural signal for analysis. Professor Mak tries to improve spike sorting algorithms, and develop a multi-channel signal processing and neural excitation system that can instantly detect and deal with huge volume of brain data in real-time.

* NOTE:
The Intel Cup Embedded System Design Contest ('Intel Cup Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest - Embedded System Design Invitational Contest') is a biennial international science and technology competition initiated by the Higher Education Department of Chinese Ministry of Education together with Personnel and Education Department of Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and is solely sponsored by Intel Corporation since 2002. It aims at fostering innovative thinking and practical skills amongst undergraduate students. In 2012, 160 teams participated in the contest, comprising students from 76 institutions of 12 countries and regions, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Mexico, Costa Rico, Argentina, Brazil, USA, and Russia.
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