Prof Amine Bermak, Electronic and Computer Engineering, has received HK$9.8 million from the Hong Kong government’s Innovation and Technology Fund for research focused on the development of a wireless multi-sensing platform for smart green buildings. Under the HKUST-MIT Research Alliance Consortium, the project involves Prof C Y Tsui and Prof George Yuan, both Electronic and Computer Engineering, and academics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and City University of Hong Kong.
Adjunct Prof Vijay Bhargava, Electronic and Computer Engineering, received a Canada Council Killam Prize 2015 in recognition of his outstanding career achievements in engineering. Prof Bhargava is an expert in wireless communications. The prize honors outstanding Canadian scholars and scientists actively engaged in research, industry, government agencies or universities.
Prof Mansun Chan, Electronic and Computer Engineering, and his Shenzhen team received a Second Class Award, Natural Science Category, in the 2014 Shenzhen Science and Technology Awards for their project on “DFM and ULTRA Nano-Scale CMOS Model for Integrated Circuit Optimization and Variation Simulation”, conducted through the PKU-HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Industry, Education and Research (IER) Base. It is the third time the team has received such an award and the second year in a row.
Prof Kai Chen, Computer Science and Engineering, and his postgraduate students are exploring the building of practical networked systems for data centers and cloud applications. Their recent work on XPath and PIAS was published at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’15), a top system conference. This was a first for papers from a university in Hong Kong.
Prof Lei Chen, Computer Science and Engineering, was awarded the ACM SIGMOD 2015 Test of Time Award, together with Prof Vincent Oria, New Jersey’s Science & Technology University, and Prof Tamer Özsu, University of Waterloo. They received the honor for their project “Robust and Fast Similarity Search for Moving Object Trajectories”, published at SIGMOD 2005. The ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award recognizes the best paper from SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior, based on identifying the paper with the most impact on research, products, and methodology over the intervening decade. Prof Chen was also appointed associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. The journal covers new developments in knowledge and data engineering, and hardware and software feasibility studies.
Prof Jack Cheng, Civil and Environmental Engineering, was named Young BIMer of the Year by the Hong Kong Construction Industry Council. He is the only person from academia to receive this industry-wide award, presented to people 40 years of age or below in recognition of efforts and achievements in building information modeling (BIM).
A poster by Prof Vladimir Chigrinov, Prof Abhishek Srivastava, both Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), and collaborators from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, won the Outstanding Poster Award at the 2014 Taiwan Liquid Crystal Society Conference. The poster focused on the paper titled “A Bistable Negative Lens by Integrating a Polarization Switch of Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals with a Passively Anisotropic Focusing Element”. Profs Chigrinov and Srivastava were also awarded a Distinguished Poster Award at the 2015 Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium together with Prof Hoi Sing Kwok, Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering, and ECE PhD students Ying Ma and Liangyu Shi. The poster was based on the paper titled “Field-Sequential-Color Displays Based on Reflective Electrically Suppressed Helix Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal”.
Prof Xijun Hu, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has received funding of HK$1,334,360 from the Environment and Conservation Fund and the Woo Wheelock Green Fund for his project focused on “Development of SBA15-Based Bimetallic Ni-Zr Catalysts for NOx Abatement”. The study seeks to develop a continuous catalytic system for NOx treatment through the selective catalytic reduction process, using volatile organic compounds as reducing agents.
Prof Joseph H W Lee, Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies and Chair Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded Honorary Membership of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR). Honorary Membership is the most prestigious honor conferred by the IAHR Council. Prof Lee is the first recipient from Hong Kong and only the second from Greater China among the 30 international recipients since the award was first presented in 1983. There were three awardees in 2015, including Prof Lee.
Prof Bo Li, Computer Science and Engineering, was selected as a co-winner of the inaugural IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time Paper Award, together with his former PhD students, Prof Jiangchuan Liu and Mr Xinyan Zhang, and a professor from Chinese University of Hong Kong. They received the award for their paper titled “CoolStreaming/DONet: a Data-Driven Overlay Network for Peer-to-Peer Live Media Streaming”, published at IEEE INFOCOM 2005. It has been cited over 2,030 times, according to Google Scholar. The IEEE INFOCOM Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes the most frequently cited and widely recognized papers published in the past 10-12 years at INFOCOM proceedings.
Prof Zexiang Li, Electronic and Computer Engineering, was appointed to the HKSAR Commission on Strategic Development. The Commission advises the Chief Executive on Hong Kong’s long-term and overall development needs and goals, with reference to issues, direction and strategy of social, economic and political developments.
Prof Richard So, Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, has received the title of Chartered Ergonomist & Human Factors Specialist from the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors in recognition of his contribution to the field of ergonomics.
Prof Fugee Tsung, Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, has been appointed editor-in-chief of the Journal of Quality Technology (JQT) from 2016-18. In 2015, he served as editor-elect. Prof Tsung is the first member outside the US to be elected editor-in-chief. Founded in 1969, JQT is the flagship journal of the American Society for Quality, and is consistently ranked as one of the most cited journals in the areas of industrial engineering, management science, and statistics.
Prof Qiang Yang, Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was appointed editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Big Data. The journal provides cross-disciplinary innovative research ideas and applications results including novel theory, algorithms, and applications.
Prof Ke Yi and his PhD student Lu Wang, both Computer Science and Engineering, received the Best Demonstration Award at SIGMOD 2015 for their system demonstration “STORM: Spatio-Temporal Online Reasoning and Management of Large Spatio-Temporal Data”. The demonstration was a joint work with Prof Feifei Li from the University of Utah and his students.
Prof Qian Zhang, Computer Science and Engineering, and her PhD students Zeyu Wang and Zhice Yang received the Best Video Award and Best Paper Award Runner-up at ACM MobiSys 2015. The paper, “Mobile Devices Can Afford: Light-Weight Indoor Positioning with Visible Light”, was co-written with Jiansong Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia, and Chenyu Huang, Wuhan University. ACM MobiSys is a major international conference for mobile systems, applications, and services areas.
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