SENG Academics Received National Honors for Geotechnical and Computer Vision Projects
Pioneering projects on geotechnical engineering and computer vision saw School of Engineering (SENG) scholars collect two major national honors in the Ministry of Education’s Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Science and Technology) 2013, with one in First Class and one in Second. The awards recognize outstanding research projects being carried out at tertiary institutions throughout China.
The following summarizes SENG’s projects which are winners of the Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards (Science and Technology) in 2013.
First Class in Scientific and Technological Progress Award
Prof Charles W W Ng, Chair Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
“Theory and Key Technology of the Stability and Deformation Control During the Whole Process of Large and Deep Excavation in Coastal Area”
Prof Charles Ng and collaborators from Tianjin University as well as industry partners from Mainland have worked on the research project for more than 10 years. Based on research findings and outcomes, many engineering projects have been able to be carried out to minimize environmental impacts caused by the process of excavation, to reduce energy consumption and to promote the efficient use of groundwater resource in the underground structures. The award is presented to the team for (i) contributing new insights and understanding of deformation and failure mechanisms of deep underground structures, (ii) identifying key controlling factors, and (iii) developing new theory and calculation methods for more economical design and faster construction of underground structures but without comprising safety.
The research outcome have been applied to 58 large-scale underground structure projects in Tianjin, Shanghai and Nanjing, leading to an economic benefit of RMB486.5 million (including saving 320,000 m3 of reinforced concrete, 47,500 tonnes of reinforcements, 250,000 tonnes of running water) and reducing the construction periods by 105 months among the projects.
A total of 142 papers, including 78 SCI/EI papers, have been published and widely cited for over 1,200 times. One of the papers has received the R M Quigley Award given by the National Research Council Canada (NRC) as the best paper published in Canadian Geotechnical Journal, the field’s leading journal, in 2012. Prof Ng and his teammates are the first and only Chinese research group winning the Award since the establishment of the Journal in 1963. In addition, more than 15 patents are received.
Second Class in Natural Sciences Award
Dr Tian Fang, Postdoctoral Fellow of Computer Science and Engineering
“Theories and Methods of Earth Surface Feature Modeling and Visualization Based on Multi-Sensor Spatial Data”
The purpose of the study is to explore the computer pattern recognition theory to implement complex 3D city reconstruction and improve segmentation accuracy. Dr Tian Fang and collaborators from Beijing Normal University and Wuhan University have made outstanding contributions to the research and application of image segmentation, intelligent data 3D scene reconstruction. They have put forward a series of novel approaches for denoising the images and point clouds with missing data, noise and complex backgrounds. They have also promoted the development of object recognition and segmentation technologies, improved the theories and methods of multi-sensor data-driven 3D reconstruction, thus forming unique theory systems for automatic reconstruction of 3D city models.
The team has published 58 SCI papers on famous international academic journals, including three papers on Remote Sensing of Environment, two papers on International Journal of Computer Vision, two papers on IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, four papers on ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. These papers have been widely cited by many other researchers. Their achievement has also been applied in the lunar exploration project.
