ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER - INFOCUS - Student Honors, Awards & Achievements

CONTENTS

Dean's Message

Spring 2015 No.26

Student Honors, Awards & Achievements

A team of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering undergraduates comprising Ali Ahmer Asif, Mohammed Danish, Nadir Hoshi and Ka Wai Tsoi, won the HKUST President’s Cup 2014 for their project "Design and Manufacture a Small Size Multi-Copter". The annual University-wide competition enables undergraduates to be recognized for outstanding achievements in research and innovation and was a clean sweep for the School of Engineering. The Gold Award went to Ezra Yoanes Setiasabda, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Silver Award to Ivan Gondoprastowo, Computer Science and Engineering.

PhD students Wei Bi and Yanjiao Chen, Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships: Hong Kong in 2014. It was the second time that Yanjiao had won this scholarship, which aims to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders.

Computer Science and Engineering researchers behind the demo system "gMission: A General Spatial Crowdsourcing Platform" received the Excellent Demonstration Award at the 40th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2014 in Hangzhou, China. The team comprised postgraduates Zhao Chen, Peng Cheng, Rui Fu, Zheng Liu, Leihao Xia, Chen Zhang, Ziyuan Zhao, postdoctoral fellow Dr Chen Cao, and alumnus Dr Yongxin Tong and was led by Prof Lei Chen. It was the first time this award went to a team from the Greater China region. There were 200 global submissions and 42 final candidates.

Three papers by Electronic and Computer Engineering students were presented at the renowned IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2014) in San Francisco.

•	One paper, by Lin Cheng and Yonggen Liu and supervised by Prof Wing-Hung Ki, looked at "A 10/30MHz Wide-Duty-Cycle-Range Buck Converter with DDA-Based Type-III Compensator and Fast Reference-Tracking Responses for DVS Applications".
•	The second, by Yan Lu and co-supervised by Prof Wing-Hung Ki and Prof Patrick Yue, focused on "A 0.65ns-Response-Time 3.01ps FOM Fully-Integrated Low-Dropout Regulator with Full-Spectrum Power-Supply-Rejection for Wideband Communication Systems". Lu was also one of the recipients of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award in recognition of his achievements in integrated circuit design.
•	The third paper was by Jungmoon Kim, an exchange student from Korea University, and was entitled "A 0.15V-Input Energy-Harvesting Charge Pump with Switching Body Biasing and Adaptive Dead-Time for Efficiency Improvement". The paper was co-supervised by Prof Philip Mok of HKUST and Prof Chulwoo Kim of Korea University.

One Student Research Preview paper was also presented. The paper was authored by Wai Chiu Ng, Ruoyu Xu and Prof George Yuan. In addition, Prof Howard Luong and Prof Philip Mok received Fellow Awards at ISSCC 2014 for their research contributions.

PhD candidate Ping Geng, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, won the Best Poster Award at the 65th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Electrochemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland for her paper "Magnéli Ti₄O₇ Nanotube Arrays as Novel Anodes for Wastewater Treatment".

PhD student Duruo Huang, Civil and Environmental Engineering, was selected for a 2014 Liu Huixian Earthquake Engineering Scholarship Award. The competitive awards are granted to 10 graduate students in earthquake engineering enrolled in universities and research institutes in the US, China and Singapore, or member organizations of the Asian-Pacific Network of Centers for Earthquake Engineering Research. Duruo was the first winner from Hong Kong since the scholarships were established in 2010.

MPhil student Srinath Kumar, Civil and Environmental Engineering, received an Outstanding Students' Projects Award at the Autodesk Hong Kong Building Information Modeling (BIM) Awards 2014. His winning project focused on “Construction Site Layout Planning Using BIM".

PhD student Yepang Liu, Computer Science and Engineering, was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, held in India, for his paper “Characterizing and Detecting Performance Bugs for Smartphone Applications". The work formed part of Yepang's collaboration with alumnus Prof Chang Xu, now at Nanjing University, and Prof Shing Chi Cheung.

Two PhD students from different departments have received Fulbright-RGC Hong Kong Research Scholar Awards for 2014-2015. Cheng Long, Computer Science and Engineering, and Chi Yan Tso, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, undertook research at University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively.

PhD candidate Ying Khai Teh, Electronic and Computer Engineering, was a co-winner of the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE 57th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Texas, US. His paper was titled “A Bipolar Output Voltage Pulse Transformer Boost Converter with Charge Pump Assisted Shunt Regulator for Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting" and co-written with Prof Philip Mok. The other winner was from Texas A&M University.

PhD student Haofei Wang, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won the postgraduate section and overall championship at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Hong Kong Young Professionals Exhibition & Competition 2014. He went on to represent Hong Kong in the 2014 IET Asia Pacific Region "Present Around The World (PATW)" Competition in Malaysia in August.

PhD student Naiyan Wang, Computer Science and Engineering, received the prestigious Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning. Only four people among an extremely competitive pool of applicants were awarded a Google China PhD Fellowship in 2014.

PhD students Kandy Kan Kan Yeung and Belsy Wai Tung Yuen, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, won the Gold Award at the JEC Outstanding Engineering Project Awards for their project "The Versatile Acoustics Filtration System with the Use of Ultrasound". The awards were organized by Jardine Engineering Corporation.

Undergraduate Xiong Zeng, Dual Degree Program in Technology and Management, and his team won the first prize in the 2014 UBS Group Technology Case Study Challenge, Hong Kong.

Environmental Engineering PhD student Simon Zhen Zhang, supervised by Prof Irene Lo, received the Best Paper Award at the 2014 International Conference on Soil and Groundwater Environment in Seoul, Korea. More than 300 experts and researchers in soil and groundwater from 15 countries attended the conference.