A postgraduate engineering student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), LI Chak-man, under the supervision of Prof. LAU Wing-cheong, Department of Information Engineering, has developed ‘Authenticated Paper’ – an anti-counterfeiting technology that is cost-effective, simple-to-use and secure.  The technology can be used to create authenticated paper-based documents or credentials which can be easily verified by handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets, without requiring network access.  The technology has won the Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Award 2013, and will be showcased, along with four other projects of CUHK, in the coming Hong Kong Electronics Fair (Autumn Edition) 2013 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 13 to 16 October.  Members of the public are welcome to visit the CUHK booth to learn more about them. 

Offline verification protects data privacy

All printed documents or credentials are potentially subject to counterfeiting and forgery.  Conventional counterfeiting solutions such as watermarking or printing using special-quality papers are not cost-effective.  Other common low-cost solutions such as authorized chops or stamps may only provide a false sense of security.  The use of online verification may also be vulnerable to data leakage or limited by network service availability. 

The Authenticated Paper technology developed by Professor Lau and Li Chak-man allows issuing authority to create paper-based documents and credentials embedded with 2D barcodes which can carry a large amount of authenticated data which can easily be verified by handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets without requiring network access. 

Professor Lau said, ‘Our system does not require personal data to be stored online and thus minimizes the risk of privacy leakage.  The self-authenticating document can also be readily replicated by photocopiers or printers without compromising its security properties.  This technology can be applied in the production of low-cost, forgery-proof credentials such as education diplomas, cheques, medical certificates, invoices, payment receipts, and other identity documents.’ 

Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Awards 2013

Li Chak-man’s project has won the second runner-up award in the Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Awards 2013.  The award is a biennial competition in technological innovation for full-time students of CUHK.  It was first introduced in 2004–05 as the Vice-Chancellor's Cup of Student Innovation.  The competition under the theme ‘Innovation for Better Life’ this year aims at promoting the culture of innovation and encouraging inter-disciplinary collaboration among undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Hong Kong Electronics Fair (Autumn Edition) 

Date: 13-16 October 2013

Time: 9:30am – 6:30pm (It will be closed at 5:00pm on 16 October)

Venue:Hong KongConvention and Exhibition Centre Hall 1A Concourse (CUHK Booth No.: 1CON-038). 

Please find more details about ‘Authenticated Paper’ from the following website:

http://mobitec.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/authpaper/index.php

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) will showcase 12 technological projects at the coming International ICT Expo 2013 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 13 to 16 April. Among them is the 'Binocular Tone Mapping' technology which provides an alternative way for users to watch high-quality 3D images at a low cost. 

With the wide popularity of 3D movies, more and more filmmakers produce movies in 3D. However, the dynamic range of current display devices is quite limited and can only present a much smaller range of intensity as compared with our daily visual experiences. Although the fast-growing HDR (High dynamic range) technology can preserve richer content of images, current display technology lacks the ability to accurately show HDR outputs. 

To tackle the problem, Prof. WONG Tien Tsin, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, CUHK, and his team has recently developed an innovative technology called 'Binocular Tone Mapping'. By utilizing the binocular fusion property of human vision system and the increasingly popular stereoscopic devices, the new technology offers users a low-cost and comfortable way to simultaneously perceive both the high contrast as well as the rich texture details at both dark and bright regions, so as to gain an enriched visual experience. 

Similar to two independent visual receptors, human's two eyes are able to tolerate certain degree of differences between our left and right views, e.g. disparity, differences in color, contrast, and even fine content. Our brain can naturally fuse the differences from both views, without awareness of such differences. The CUHK research team is the first to make use of this human vision phenomenon to develop 'Binocular Tone Mapping'. 

Via an optimization process, the new technology synthesizes a pair of images, one exhibits high contrast, while the other preserves the fine details. With a pair of 3D glasses and a 3D display device, a user can simultaneously visualize the image pair. These images are optimally synthesized in a way such that the user's brain can naturally fuse the two views, and perceive more visual content than any single image can offer. The dark and bright regions of the image, including rich color and texture details, can be shown clearly.  The image perceived will be closer to the scene viewed by human eyes. 

The 'Binocular Tone Mapping' technology can combine with existing stereoscopic (disparity based) movies without hurting the existing stereoscopic experience. It also virtually compensates the luminance attenuation due to the wearing of 3D glasses. The technology can be generally applied to 3D movie production, 3D games, 3D visualization as well as other digital visual entertainment applications. Users can watch images with high-quality visual effects by common 3D display devices. Comparing to the HDR technology which need the setup of expensive equipment, 'Binocular Tone Mapping' technology has a wider range of applications with a lower cost. 

Based on the binocular fusion property of human vision system, the larger the difference between the two images, the more details of the images can be seen by a user. However, there is a limit on the image difference. Exceeding such limit may lead to the visual discomfort. This technology can maximize the difference between the two images to the extent that is acceptable to human vision, and therefore allows users to watch the images in a more comfortable way. 

To know more about the aforementioned technology and other recent technological projects, please visit the booth of CUHK at the International ICT Expo (Booth No.: 3G-B04). 

Prof. Peter Tak-shing Yum and Prof. Helen Mei-Ling Meng of the Faculty of Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have been elected Fellows of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2013 for their remarkable accomplishments in 'architecture and resource management of communication networks' and 'spoken language and multimodal systems'. This year, 297 scholars were elected IEEE fellows worldwide. With the two newly-elected fellows, the total number of IEEE fellows in CUHK has risen to 30. 

Architecture and resource management of communication networks

Prof. Peter Yum is an expert in the area of wireless communications and internet, currently serving as Professor of Information Engineering at CUHK and Chief Technology Officer of Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI). Professor Yum received his BS, MS, MPh and PhD degrees in Columbia University, and started his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories working on switching and signaling systems. Professor Yum joined CUHK in 1982 and assisted Prof. Sir Charles Kao, former CUHK Vice-Chancellor, to establish the Department of Information Engineering and served as the founding director of the Information Engineering programme. He was appointed chairman of the Department twice and elected Dean of Engineering for two consecutive terms, having made great contributions to the development of the Faculty of Engineering.

Professor Yum's research interests lie in routing, buffer management, deadlock handling, message resequencing, multi-access protocols, cellular network, lightwave networks, video distribution networks, 3G networks, RFID, sensor networks and wireless positioning technologies. He has made significant contributions to the telecommunications industry and has substantial research experience through partnerships with large corporations such as Bell Labs, Bellcore (now Telcordia), IBM Research, Motorola Semiconductors, Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan, SmarTone Communications and Radio Television Hong Kong. 

Professor Yum's current research addresses human centric computing, cloud computing and big data, aiming to enhance technological competitiveness of Hong Kong through applied research. He was appointed the Fulbright Hong Kong Distinguished Scholar in 2006 and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in UK in 2008, giving lectures in various UK universities. He has been appointed Adjunct Professor by major universities in China including South East University, Zhejiang University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Since 2008 he has also been appointed Chair Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science of Tsinghua University.

Spoken language and multimodal systems

Prof. Helen Meng is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management. She obtained her BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joining CUHK in 1998, Professor Meng has established the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory and the Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory on Human-centric Computing and Interface Technologies to support research in human-centric computing, especially in the area of speech and language technologies, and the latter was conferred the status of a Key Laboratory in 2008 by the Ministry of Education (MoE). In 2009, Professor Meng received the MoE Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award in Technological Advancements which recognized her research in 'Multimodal User Interfaces with Multilingual Speech and Language Technologies – Research and Applications', becoming the first engineer to receive the award outside mainland China. She was named 'Peng Cheng Visiting Professor' of Tsinghua University Graduate School of Shenzhen in 2008 and is also the founding director of theTsinghua-CUHK Joint Research Center on Media Sciences, Technologies and Systems. In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Professor Meng also established the Ambient Intelligence and Multimodal Systems Laboratory in the CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technologies. She has also received the CUHK Faculty of Engineering Exemplary Teaching Award, Young Researcher Award and Service Award for her outstanding achievement and teaching and research.  

Professor Meng is an expert in speech and language technologies and has been studying how they can be adapted and integrated into multilingual and spoken language systems.  She has also conducted significant research in integrating speech with gestures in intelligent, multimodal user interfaces. Her approaches towards the development of innovative technologies are theoretically grounded in acoustic-phonetics, phonology, linguistics, signal processing and pattern recognition. Being the principal investigator in many research projects, Professor Meng has invented a computer-aided pronunciation training system that helps improve Chinese learners' proficiency in English. She has also led the development of one of the first trilingual human-computer spoken dialog systems; the multimodal biometric authentication systems that combine voiceprint, fingerprint and facial image recognition; one of the first English-Chinese translingual retrieval systems; a Cantonese text-to-speech synthesis system to support reading software for the visually impaired community; and an audiovisual speech synthesis system for both Cantonese and Mandarin to support a talking avatar. Professor Meng is dedicated to serving the public and has been a member of the Digital 21 Advisory Committee, Joint Committee on Information Technology for the social welfare sector and the Research Grants Council.

About IEEE

The IEEE is the world's largest professional organization, with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries.  IEEE members play a vital role in computer science, electronics, telecommunications and engineering fields etc.  Fellowship is the highest grade of membership and one of the most prestigious honours the IEEE can bestow upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.