In Focus - Issue 25 (Summer 2014)

Student Honors, Awards & Achievements Computer Science and Engineering PhD student Jeff Huang received the prestigious 2013 SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis “Effective Methods for Debugging Concurrent Software”. This award is given annually to only one author of an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of software engineering from all over the world. In addition, his paper “CLAP: Recording Local Executions to Reproduce Concurrency Failures”, collaborated with IBM Research, received the SIGPLAN PLDI Distinguished Paper Award at the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2013) in Seattle. PLDI is a significant event for publishing research results in the area of programming languages and software analysis. This was the first SIGPLAN PLDI paper award in Asia. Jeff is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PhD students Wei Bi and Yanjiao Chen, Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded the prestigious Google Fellowship in Machine Learning and Google Fellowship in Mobile Computing respectively. Only four out of an extremely competitive pool of applicants were awarded the fellowships in China in 2013. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students pursuing work in computer science and related disciplines. Three Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering PhD students won Third Prize at the International Contest of Applications in Nano-Micro Technologies (iCAN 2013). Yuanwu Chen, Weiqiang Li and Yejun Zhu developed a project entitled “Intelligent Happiness Detector”. This is an integrated microsystem consisting of a wireless brainwave sensor, body-temperature sensor, heart-rate sensor, LED indictors for happiness level, micro controller unit and built-in computer program for calibration and analysis of sensor output. They were one of 18 teams from nine countries and regions selected for the final contest in Barcelona. The judging panel comprised more than 40 entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world. PhD student Wei Dai, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) held in September 2013 in Melbourne. The paper was entitled “Rate-Distortion Optimized Merge Frame Using Piecewise Constant Functions”, and coauthored by Prof Oscar Au and collaborators from Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, Singapore University of Technology and Design and University of Southern California. ICIP is one of two flagship conferences of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. It is known as the best conference for image processing with about 1,000 papers. Electronic and Computer Engineering PhD student Shuming Chen received the Runner-up Prize in the Hong Kong Institution of Science 2013 Young Scientist Awards (Engineering Science Category) with his project on white organic light-emitting diodes (WOLEDs). He was able to achieve a WOLED with high efficiency of 66 lm/W and a high CRI of 92. The technology is now being applied to four-inch displays/lighting panels in a pilot project produced by a start-up company. Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates Junhong Cao, Lingou Deng and Xiongqi Zhang, all coached by Prof Ke Yi, won the Championship at the annual ACM-HK Programming Contest 2013. The event involved eight Hong Kong universities as well as two from Macau. IN FOCUS 20

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