In Focus - Issue 24 (Fall 2013)

IN FOCUS 16 Prestigious Fellowships School of Engineering academics have been elected fellows of various prestigious professional organizations, demonstrating the faculty team’s global standing and contribution to their respective fields. Prof Qiang Yang, Computer Science and Engineering, has become a 2013 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow. This is the highest honor in the AI community and Prof Yang is the first to achieve such recognition in Greater China. He was recognized for significant contributions to AI planning, data mining and casebased reasoning. Six faculty members from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering have been made Fellows of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE), which promotes the advancement of engineering and facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas. They are Dean of Engineering Prof Khaled Ben Letaief, Associate Dean Prof Roger Cheng, Head of Department Prof Ross Murch, Prof Oscar Au, Prof Vincent Lau and Prof Danny Tsang. Prof Murch has also been elected a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). The IET is a worldleading professional organization, sharing and advancing knowledge to promote science, engineering and technology, and has more than 150,000 members worldwide in 127 countries. Prof Au has been elected Chair of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Image, Video, and Multimedia Technical Committee. APSIPA is an emerging association aimed at promoting research and education activities in signal and information processing. Prof Gary Chan, Computer Science and Engineering, and his team gained a merit award in the research and development category of the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Awards 2012 for their innovative multi-hop wireless network for pervasive Wi-Fi access, which greatly improves wireless data transmission efficiency and coverage. Prof Hoi Sing Kwok, Electronic and Computer Engineering, was awarded the 2013 Society for Information Display (SID) Slottow-Owaki Prize. He was honored for the creation of the Center for Display Research at HKUST, which has trained and educated many people in the field in Asia. Prof Weichuan Yu, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won the Biomedical Wellness Pioneer Award at the 2013 SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing meeting in Baltimore, US, in recognition of his pioneering contribution to biomedical computing. A total of six awards were given out at the meeting. The event attracted more than 6,000 registered attendees and nearly 500 companies. CUS 16 professorships were also set up especially for the HKUST Institute for Advanced Study. President Prof Tony F Chan noted that the accomplishments of the named professors in their respective fields were recognized at the forefront of international scholarship, helping the University to develop into a worldclass research institution. He also expressed his gratitude to community donors for their wholehearted support. Prof Francesco Ciucci, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his collaborators from MIT Ideation Laboratory received the Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA) Ten Award 2013. The JALA Ten is an annual editorial feature that highlights 10 top technological breakthroughs from all types of research organizations. Prof Ciucci’s team was recognized for a new game-theoretic approach for the determination of Pareto optima in engineering design in the article “An InformationPassing Strategy for Achieving Pareto Optimality in the Design of Complex Systems”, published in Research in Engineering Design.

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