Updates & News - 2018

ZJU Collaboration Updates & News - 2018

City Brain and Challenges for Future City 2018 Forum

Prof Ricky Ang, Ng Teng Fong Professor and Director of SUTD-ZJU IDEA was invited to attend the City Brain and Challenges for Future City 2018 Forum held in Hangzhou in November 2018.

The key takeaways from this forum are

• The ‘City Brain’ relies on the internet infrastructure and takes advantage of urban data resources to conduct a real-time analysis of the city in order to effectively allocate public resources, continuously improve social governance, and promote sustainable urban development.
• In the future, data resources will be more important than land resources in urban development, and a city should have a complete set of algorithms that support urbanisation and build urban quality life.
• The algorithms are the ‘wisdom’ of a city. The ‘City Brain’ will become a basic infrastructure just like electric and water supply that every city will need in future.

There are potential internship opportunities in Shanghai Pudong and Hangzhou for students trained in ‘data science/engineering + urban planning’.
 

Outcome of Call for Proposal 2018 for SUTD-ZJU IDEA Seed Grant

The Call for Proposal (CFP) 2018 for SUTD-ZJU IDEA Seed Grant was announced to SUTD faculty members in September 2018 and a total of five projects were awarded. The funding period is from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019.

List of awarded projects:

The 10^th International Conference on Wireless Communication and Signal Process

The 10^th International Conference on Wireless Communication and Signal Process was successfully held in Hangzhou, China from 18 to 20 October 2018. SUTD-ZJU IDEA is the silver sponsor to this conference.

Associate Prof Tony Quek, Acting Head of Information Systems Technology and Design pillar and Deputy Director of SUTD-ZJU IDEA was one of the Technical Program Committee Co-Chairs of this conference.

Prof Tony Quek giving a speech.

Prof Costas Courcoubetis (Engineering System Design, SUTD) was invited in the Panel Discussion and gave a keynote speech titled 'Exploiting Delay-Tolerance in 5G: Decongesting in Backhaul'.

Prof Costas Courcoubetis in the Panel Discussion.

Keynote speakers and organizing committee members.

Launch of SUTD-ZJU IDEA Grant for Visiting Professor

The SUTD-ZJU IDEA Grant for Visiting Professor is funded by the Ministry of Education, Singapore. SUTD-ZJU IDEA serves as the central entity for all research collaboration between SUTD and ZJU. The quantum of this grant is up to S$100,000 per project for up to three years and the funding will mainly be used to support the ZJU visiting professors to SUTD. The first grant call was announced in March 2018 and six projects were awarded.

List of award projects:

Joint Research Workshop with ZJU and Alibaba UED

The Alibaba UED – SUTD – ZJU Joint Research Workshop was held in the Alibaba Xixi Park in April 2018. This joint workshop was co-organised by IDEA of SUTD and ZJU, and hosted by ZJU International Design Institute (IDI).

The Alibaba UED team shared insights relating to the research direction of their Natural Human-Computer Interaction Lab and UED talent acquisition plan. Dr Paul Fu, Head of Natural Human-Computer Interaction Lab, DAMO Academy introduced the business system of Alibaba UED and the three key revolutionary changes in the human-computer interaction area. Ms Yu Ning, Head of Talent Acquisition, Alibaba UED Committee and Head of UED, Tmall shared that, compared with the traditional identity of designers, there are currently tremendous changes for the requirement of designers. The four types of jobs that Alibaba UED looks to hire in the near future are user experience research, experiential design, innovation design and content strategy. 

In the opening speech, Prof Lim Sun Sun (Head, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, SUTD) introduced SUTD’s unique pedagogy, curriculum design, promising student employment and an overview of collaboration between SUTD and ZJU. Associate Prof Tony Quek (Information Systems Technology and Design) shared SUTD's roadmap of AI initiatives and emphasised the four key areas of development, including basic theoretic research in AI, discovery by AI, AI interaction and future infrastructure of AI. Assistant Prof Lu Wei (Information Systems Technology and Design) shared his insights on a design interface of the structured prediction model providing a framework dedicated for researchers.

The SUTD team toured the Alibaba Xixi Park.

Dr Xiang Wei from IDI ZJU also demonstrated the latest research of his team in video generation via crowdsourcing and the generative adversarial neural (GAN) network. Prof Cheng Shiwei from Zhejiang University of Technology revealed his research in the human-computer interaction based on eye tracking, including eye-tracking interaction on mobile devices, eye-tracking interaction game, eye-tracking based visualised design optimisation and eye-tracking based VR interaction. Dr Qiu Yuanfu, CEO of User Experience Research Pte Ltd (Singapore) introduced the current situation of user experience research in Southeast Asia and shared the technical capability of his company.

Group photo of workshop participants.

Alibaba Annual Conference on Academic Cooperation and Alibaba Innovation Research

Associate Prof Tony Quek, Deputy Director of SUTD-ZJU IDEA and Assistant Prof Lu Wei from the Information Systems Technology and Design pillar, attended the Alibaba Annual Conference on Academic Cooperation in Hangzhou. At the conference, Alibaba technical teams spelled out the technical challenges they were facing and invited worldwide researchers to form research collaborations that fit into real industry scenarios through the Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) grant. SUTD faculty members were encouraged to apply for the AIR grant to deepen collaborations with Alibaba.
 

Alibaba UCAN Conference 2018

The Alibaba UCAN Conference is an industry conference organised by the Alibaba User Experience Design (UED) Committee annually. As a follow-up to Alibaba UED team’s visit to SUTD in November 2017, SUTD-ZJU IDEA sponsored Prof Lim Sun Sun (Head, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) and Assistant Prof Lu Wei (Information Systems Technology and Design) to attend the Alibaba UCAN Conference 2018 held in Hangzhou, in April 2018. The conference was a great opportunity for establishing networks and potential collaborations with Chinese companies, especially within the Alibaba ecosystem.
 

Sponsorship of the Overseas Immersion Programme 2018

The Overseas Immersion Programme conducted in March 2018 was led by Prof Felix Raspall from the Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) pillar. 14 ASD students (11 undergraduate and 3 master students) participated in the programme to visit Hanoi, Vietnam, and Hangzhou and Ningbo, China. The trip was co-sponsored by SUTD-ZJU IDEA and the Office of Education, SUTD.


 

Establishment of Network Intelligence Joint Research Centre under SUTD-ZJU IDEA

The Network Intelligence (NI) Joint Research Centre was opened on the Yuquan Campus of Zhejiang University on 9 January 2018. Prof Tony Quek, Deputy Director of SUTD-ZJU IDEA@SUTD, Prof Sun Lingyun, Directory of SUTD-ZJU IDEA@ZJU and Prof Yang Jianyi, Vice President of College of Information Science & Electronic Engineering, ZJU jointly inaugurated the joint research centre.