Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme 2012/13

If you are interested to pursue your PhD in universities in Hong Kong, don't miss the opportunity for the PhD Fellowship Scheme available here: http://cerg1.ugc.edu.hk/hkpfs/index.html

Due dates for the application submission is on early December 2011.

UTAR Postgraduate & Professional Development Day

Dear all,

UTAR will be organizing the Postgraduate & Professional Development Day. If you or your friends are looking for opportunities to further your education, feel free to visit the event.

Date: 1 October 2011 (Saturday)
Time: 10am - 4pm
Venue: UTAR PJ Campus [map]

Details are available here:  UTAR Postgraduate and Professional Development Day Brochure

CCIS Seminar: Robust Fitting and Model Selection in Computer Vision

Dear Colleagues,
Centre for Computing and Intelligent Systems (CCIS), Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) will be organizing the following open seminar:

Date: 7 Oct 2011 (Friday)
Time: 11:30am-12.00pm
Venue: 6th Floor Meeting room, SA Block, FES,  UTAR, KL Campus, Jalan Genting Kelang, 53300 Kuala Lumpur
Speaker: Tat-Jun Chin
Title: Robust Fitting and Model Selection in Computer Vision
Abstract: One of the earliest examples of robust model fitting in Computer Vision is to detect lines and curves in images using the Hough Transform (Duda and Hart, 1972). Since then robust model fitting techniques have become part of the standard toolbox for Computer Vision researchers and practitioners, especially on geometry estimation problems where approaches like RANSAC dominate. Robustness is crucial in many cases as the data acquisition and preprocessing pipeline is inevitably imperfect, and this introduces outliers and noise into the data. A second important aspect is model selection, especially in the case of multiple structures, i.e. how many lines do we have in the image? Traditional model selection techniques dictate that the best model is the one that balances goodness of fit and model complexity. In this talk I will discuss ongoing work at The University of Adelaide to find new paradigms for robust model fitting and model selection. In particular I will report recently proposed methods that cast robust model fitting and model selection as statistical learning problems. These new methods offer the promise of more robustness and applicability to a wider range of problems.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Tat-Jun Chin is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at The University of Adelaide. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Systems Engineering from Monash University, and B.Eng in Mechatronics from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). Dr Chin's current research focusses on robust model fitting approaches for Computer Vision applications. In particular he is interested in searching for new paradigms for the fundamental underpinning of robust model fitting approaches, and to extend the applicability of robust model fitting approaches to a wider range of problems and operating conditions.


The seminar is open to all staff, students and public. Admission is free and no registration required. Please encourage your students / research counterparts to attend this seminar.

CCIS Seminar: Multimedia Forensics & Inverse Light Transport: Introduction and Open Problems

Dear Colleagues,
Centre for Computing and Intelligent Systems (CCIS), Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) will be organizing the following open seminar:

Date: 7 Oct 2011 (Friday)
Time: 11:00am-11.30am
Venue: 6th Floor Meeting room, SA Block, FES,  UTAR, KL Campus, Jalan Genting Kelang, 53300 Kuala Lumpur
Speaker: Tian-Tsong Ng
Title: Multimedia Forensics & Inverse Light Transport: Introduction and Open Problems
Abstract: Multimedia forensics arises from a question as old as photography: When is seeing is believing. Today, images and videos are as commonly exchanged and shared as are text messages when Internet was first invented. Visual content has become inseparable from our daily communications and is increasingly used as personal records or evidence in courts of law. I will introduce multimedia forensics and describe the open problems awaiting answers.
I will also briefly talk about a different research topic in computer vision and graphics known as inverse light transport. Light transport is function that maps the light sources and the images. Inverse light transport can be considered a general framework for tackling low-level computer vision problems and the research is still at its infancy. I will introduce the related early works and the open problems.
Speaker Bio:
Tian-Tsong Ng is a research scientist in Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore. He received his B.Eng in Electrical Engineering from University of Malaya in 1998, his M.Phil. in Signal Processing from Cambridge University in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2007. His research interest lies in computer vision, computer graphics and image forensics.
He won the Microsoft Best Student Paper Award at ACM Multimedia Conference in 2005, the John Wiley & Sons Best Paper Award at the first IEEE Workshop in Information Security and Forensics in 2009 and I2R Best Paper Award in 2010. He is a Commonwealth Scholar and an A*STAR Overseas Graduate Scholar.


The seminar is open to all staff, students and public. Admission is free and no registration required. Please encourage your students / research counterparts to attend this seminar.

Talk: Cryptography - Everywhere! - A Lecture by Prof. Kenny Paterson

Dear All,

You are invited to attend a lecture on cryptography at MIMOS:

Lecture : Cryptography - everywhere!
Speaker : Prof. Kenny Paterson (Information Security Group, Royal Holloway)
Date      : 10 October 2011
Time      : 9.30 am – 11.00 am
Venue : MIMOS Auditorium, Technology Park Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.


Prof. Kenny Paterson is a professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London,  one of the most prestigious security and cryptography groups in Europe. Since March 2010, he has been employed full-time as an EPSRC Leadership Fellow with the fellowship entitled "Cryptography: Bridging Theory and Practice".

His main area of research is Cryptography, with broader interests in Information Security and the mathematics of communications systems. Kenny completed his Ph.D. at Royal Holloway in 1993, and was then a Royal Society fellow at Institute for Signal and Information Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich from 1993 to 1994. After that, he was a Lloyd's of London Tercentenary Foundation Research Fellow at Royal Holloway from 1994 to 1996. He then worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol from 1996 to 2001, before rejoining Royal Holloway in 2001. Kenny is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cryptology, was program chair for Eurocrypt 2011, and consults widely to industry and governments.

We would appreciate that you response to this email to (gspoh@mimos.my) by 6 Oct 2011 if you intend to attend the lecture for us to estimate the number of audience and please feel free to share this information with your colleagues.

The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2012)

PAKDD 2012: The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(Proceedings of the conference will be published in LNCS by Springer).

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 29 - June 1, 2012
Conference web site: http://pakdd2012.pakdd.org/

Important Dates Paper Submission Due: 2 October, 2011 (Sunday)
Author Notification: 30 December, 2011 (Friday)
Camera Ready Due: 22 January, 2012 (Sunday)

Conference Scope
The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is a leading international conference in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery (KDD). It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD related areas, including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, aritificial intelligence, databases, statistics, knowledge engineering, visualization, and decision-making systems. The conference calls for research papers reporting original investigation results and industrial papers reporting real data mining applications and system development experience.

Topics
The topics of relevance for the conference papers include but not limited to the following:

• Novel models and algorithms
• Clustering
• Classification
• Ranking
• Association analysis
• Anomaly detection
• Data pre-processing
• Feature extraction and selection
• Mining heterogeneous data
• Mining multi-source data
• Mining sequential data
• Mining spatial and temporal data
• Mining unstructured and semi-structured data
• Mining graph and network data
• Parallel, distributed, and high performance data mining on the cloud platform
• Privacy preserving data mining
• Mining high dimensional data
• Mining uncertain data
• Mining imbalanced data
• Mining dynamic/streaming data
• Statistical methods for data mining
• Visual data mining
• Interactive and online mining
• Mining behavioral data
• Mining multimedia data
• Mining scientific databases
• Ubiquitous knowledge discovery
• Agent-based data mining
• Mining social networks
• Financial data mining
• Fraud and risk analysis
• Security and intrusion detection
• Opinion mining and sentiment analysis
• Post-processing including quality assessment and validation
• Integration of data warehousing, OLAP and data mining
• Human, domain, organizational and social factors in data mining
• Applications to healthcare, bioinformatics, computational chemistry,
• Eco-informatics, marketing, online gaming, etc

All paper submissions will be handled electronically. Detailed instructions are provided on the conference home page.

Work Completion Seminar: Cheng Kam Ching

Your are cordially invited to the following work completion seminar:

Date: 30 September 2011 (Friday)

Time: 2:30pm-3:30pm

Venue: 5A meeting room, 5th floor, SA block,SE202 Setapak Campus, FES, UTAR, Kuala Lumpur. [map]

Admission: Free

Speaker: Cheng Kam Ching

Title: Development of Job Matching Algorithm with Collective Learning Methods
Abstract:

Hiring or job match placing the wrong job seekers to the particular job posted by the employers is a costly mistake. As it is the key to keep the job site remain competitive. The classical online recruiting applications use only simple Boolean operations comparing the basic requirement information to generate the job matched results to job seekers. Therefore, it's often claimed to be irrelevant job matched or too many "hits" [1]. Job seekers must browse through a long list of job advertisements in a given query [2]. The problem of the classical method is about the data modelling. Job seekers need to fill up massive form-based basic requirement information. The data given is too subjective to define its importance. Hence, the matching may not be good. Besides, online recruiting application must be able to discover interesting jobs for recommendation. Job seekers are more likely excited to see a range of different job types in which really match his or her working profiles and own interests. This is the area addressed by this research described in this thesis. An investigation and development of a different method of job matching algorithm was undertaken. The primary objective of this research is to offer an intelligence job matching mechanism incorporated the relevant feedback approach. Real data (job title, job descriptions and job requirements of 3000 job advertisements) from Jobstreet will be pursued with detailed analysis for the validation of the proposed method.

Talk on High Impact Research on Cloud Computing By Professor Rajkumar Buyya

Please be informed that the Department of Computer System and Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya is organizing a seminar with the following details:

Date: 21 September 2011 (Wednesday)
Time: 10:00-11:00
Location: DK2, FCSIT, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. [map]
Speaker: Professor Rajkumar Buyya, The University of Melbourne, Australia; CEO, Manjrasoft Pvt Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Title: High Impact Research on Cloud Computing: The Next Revolution in Information Technology

All are welcome to the seminar.

====================
Abstract: Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditised and delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision. Cloud computing is the most recent emerging paradigm promising to turn the vision of "computing utilities" into a reality.

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the buzzwords in the ICT industry. Several IT vendors are promising to offer storage, computation and application hosting services, and provide coverage in several continents, offering Service-Level Agreements (SLA) backed performance and uptime promises for their services. It delivers infrastructure, platform, and software (application) as services, which are made available as subscription-based services in a pay-as-you-go model to consumers.  The price that Cloud Service Providers charge can vary with time and the quality of service (QoS) expectations of consumers.

This talk (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver the vision of computing utilities; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds by leveraging technologies such as VMs; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents Aneka, a software system for rapid development of Cloud applications and their deployment on private/public Clouds with resource provisioning driven by SLAs and user QoS requirements, (5) reports experimental results on deploying Cloud applications in engineering, gaming, and health care domains on private or public Clouds, and (6) concludes with the need for convergence of competing IT paradigms for delivering our 21st century vision along with pathways for future research.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Rajkumar Buyya is Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering; and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft., a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing. He has authored 350 publications and four text books. He also edited several books including "Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms" recently published by Wiley Press, USA. He is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide.

Software technologies for Grid and Cloud computing developed under Dr. Buyya's leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 40 countries around the world. Dr. Buyya has led the establishment and development of key community activities, including serving as foundation Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and five IEEE/ACM conferences. These contributions and international research leadership of Dr. Buyya are recognized through the award of "2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing" from the IEEE Computer Society, USA. Manjrasoft’s Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received "2010 Asia Pacific Frost&  Sullivan New Product Innovation Award". For further information on Dr. Buyya, please visit his cyberhome: www.buyya.com

D.A.R.E. BizStart 2011

For those who have some business idea and would like to explore the possibility to expand it, or to make some friends in the entrepreneur community, don't miss this event. There will be a number of entrepreneurs who will be sharing their past experience in the event as well.

Date: 28-29 September 2011
Venue:  Sunway Pyramid Convention Center [map]
Admission: FREE.

Tentative Agenda:

To register, log on to www.bizstart.com.my, click ‘GRAB YOUR FREE TICKET’ on the right hand column.

Google DevFest 2011 @ Kuala Lumpur

Google DevFest is an annual event for developers to learn about Google technologies and products. Since 2008, it has attracted thousands of app developers around the globe to participate in this event.

This year, Google will bring this popular DevFest event to Asia. Event at Kuala Lumpur here:

Date: 29 September 2011
Time: 9:00am - 7:00pm
Venue: UCTI College, Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil, Kuala Lumpur. [map]

	Track 1	Track 2
09:00 - 09:30	Keynote
09:30 - 10:30	Android Market for Developers (Tony Chan)
10:30 - 11:00	AM Break
11:00 - 12:00	Bleeding Edge HTML5 (Eric Bidelman)
12:00 - 13:00	Implementing Google Analytics (Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar)
13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
14:00 - 15:00	What's New and Important in Android (Tony Chan)	Displaying Large Geographic Datasets: Google Fusion Tables (Luke Mahe)
15:00 - 16:00	These Aren't the Site You're Looking For: Modern HTML5 Web Apps(Eric Bidelman)	Working Off the Grid: HTML5 Offline (Ernest Delgado)
16:00 - 16:30	PM Break
16:30 - 17:30	Insights to Drive Your Business Forward (Analytics Codelab) (Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar)	Fusion Tables (Geo Codelab) (Luke Mahe)
17:30 - 18:30	Demos
18:30 - 19:00	Q & A

Please register yourself here: https://devregsystem.appspot.com/?eid=234804

update of the event, please check out at the Google site here: http://code.google.com/events/devfests/2011/seasia.html#kualalumpur

CCSN Seminar by Dr. Jonathan Loo.

Dear all,

The Center for Communication Systems and Networking will be organizing a university-wide seminar, as part of Brain Gain Malaysia Lecture Series, on the 21st of September from 11 AM to 12 Noon. The details of the seminar is given below.

Topic: Future Trends in Video Coding R&D and Security Provision of Internet of Things/6LoWPAN
Date: 21 September 2011
Time: 11 AM to 12 Noon
Venue: 6th Floor Meeting Room, FES, UTAR KL Campus, Setapak, Kuala Lumpur.
Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Loo, Reader, Middlesex University, United Kingdom

Kok Keong Loo a.k.a Jonathan Loo received his MSc degree in Electronics (with Distinction) from University of Hertfordshire, UK in 1998 and the PhD degree in Electronics and Communications from the same university in 2003. Between August 2003 and May 2010, he was a Lecturer in Multimedia Communications at the School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University, UK. Currently, he is a Reader (Associate Professor) at the School of Engineering and Information Sciences, Middlesex University, UK. At Brunel, he was a Course Director for the MSc in Digital Signal Processing programme. He also involved in several research projects where he was a Principal Investigator for a joint research project between BBC and Brunel University on Dirac video codec research and development, and a co-investigator for several European funded projects namely IST FP6 PLUTO IST FP6 ENABLE, and recently the IST FP7 3D-Vivant. So far, he has successfully supervised 10 PhDs as the Director of Studies. His research interests are in the general area of multimedia communications include visual media processing, video coding and transmission, wireless communications, digital signal processing, embedded systems and wireless network, protocols and security. In the past 7 years, he published in total of 128 publications (book chapters, journals, conferences) in the aforementioned areas. Recently, he has completed an edited book called "Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Current Status and Future Trends" which will be published by CRC Press.

PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering at IMT Lucca

The institute for advanced studies IMT Lucca (Italy) announces 12 PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering. The deadline for applications is September 28, 2011.

IMT (http://www.imtlucca.it/) is a research institute located in Lucca (Italy); courses are taught exclusively in English.

The PhD Program (https://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/computer_science_engineering/) coordinated by Rocco De Nicola aims at preparing researchers and professionals with broad training in the foundations of informatics as well as in applications to a variety of cutting-edge systems and disciplines.

A number of PhD students will be selected for working within the the two newly founded Research Unit:

SysMA (http://sysma.lab.imtlucca.it/) lead by Rocco De Nicola doing research on concurrent (distributed, mobile, autonomic) systems modelling and analysis and Dysco (http://dysco.lab.imtlucca.it/) lead by Alberto Bemporad doing research on control and optimization technologies.

In addition, students will be selected to work on topics related to medical imaging, and imaging for the life sciences http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~stsaft/#Openings

We hope that you may consider applying for and/or signaling these opportunities to colleagues and collaborators.

======= DETAILS ON THE ADVERTISED POSITIONS =======
6 IMT scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus accommodation and free meals (lunch and dinner).
1 MIUR scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus free meals (lunch and dinner).
5 positions to be funded with internal projects or third-party scholarships (negotiable salary) that come with a research budget of 3.000 EUR offered by IMT and free meals (lunch and dinner).

For further information please visit
http://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/call_for_applications/index.php
and/or contact the sender of this mail.

Excellence in TNE: Partnerships for the Future 15-16 Nov 2011 @ KL

DATE: 15 – 16 NOVEMBER 2011, KUALA LUMPUR    
VENUE: AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION, KUALA LUMPUR 

In order to support and inform decision making and practice in the area of Transnational Education, British Council and Australian Edn International would like to invite you to "Excellence in TNE: Partnerships for the Future".

This symposium and policy dialogue will bring together decision-makers, planners,practioners and academics from Ministries, Instituitions and teh private sector. Delegates will have opportunities to share info and highest examples of excellence in transnational education partnerships and explore the future evolution of transnational education in the region and beyond.

Should you require more info, please log onto: http://www.britishcouncil.org/malaysia-excellenceintne.htm or http://www.aei.gov.au/international-network/malaysia

or contact:

Mina Patel at mina.patel@britishcouncil.org.my or on 012 2950503.
Petronila Maurice at Petronila.Maurice@dfat.gov.au or on +603 21465605

Yours Sincerely

Louise McSorley,
the Australian High Commission

and

Francine Dawson
British Council Malaysia

The 12th Asia-Pacific ITS Forum and Exhibition 2012

The 12th Asia-Pacific ITS Forum and Exhibition 2012 (ITS-AP 2012) will be held in Kuala Lumpur from 16 to 18 April 2012. Due date for submission of abstract is on 1 October 2011. This year's event (ITS-AP 2011) was held with great success in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The event attracted over 500 participants from all over the world, spread evenly between academia and industry.

Check out the details of the event ITS-AP 2012 here: http://www.itsasiapacific2012.com/

Postgraduate Seminar: An Empirical Study of Business Intelligence adoption among Malaysia Organizations

You are cordially invited to attend the following proposal defense:


Speaker: Ong In Lih
Date: 13 September 2011 (Tuesday)
Time: 11:00am-11:45am
Venue: 5A meeting room, 5th floor, SA block, UTAR Setapak Campus, Kuala Lumpur.
Title: An Empirical Study of Business Intelligence adoption among Malaysia Organizations
Abstract 
In recent years, business intelligence (BI) has emerged as one of the top technology priorities for many worldwide organizations. BI acts as a source of competitive advantage to support key business processes that could affect an organization’s bottom line. Despite of the apparent significance of BI, many organizations still have not successfully gained full benefits from their BI investment. The contributing reasons are the lack of higher level analytics and intelligent functions, insufficient business involvement, absence of skilled staff, and poor data quality. Apparently, an organization needs to be in a higher level of maturity to reap full benefits of BI. However, for organizations to be able to evolve to a higher maturity level, it will require them to identify their position in the BI journey and know how to attain to the next level. To address these two issues, this research intends to develop a maturity model containing dimensions that are critical to the implementation of BI. For each dimension, it will spell out criteria to move from the lowest level of maturity all the way to the highest level of maturity. Having this maturity model as guidance to assess existing BI capabilities, organizations are assured that they can effectively devise a systematic plan to achieve higher BI maturity level. In this research, data will be collected using a mixed method of structured survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews. Based on the extensive literature review, an initial version of survey instrument will be developed using questionnaire and pilot-tested on five selected Malaysian organizations across a wide variety of industries. Then, the preliminary BI maturity model will be produced and further validated. The sample of actual survey is estimated to have at least 30 participants. It is believed that the results of the research will provide useful guidelines to move forward to expand the business value of the BI implementation. As such, BI stakeholders will be in a better position to discover existing problems and optimize their scarce resources by focusing on critical dimensions that have a greater impact on BI implementation.

Stanford Introduction to Databases Class

Apart from the AI class and Machine Learning Class, here is another online class offered by Stanford University's Computer Science Department: Introduction to Databases, by Prof Jennifer Widom. Sign up here: http://www.db-class.com/

Course Description:
This course covers database design and the use of database management systems for applications. It includes extensive coverage of the relational model, relational algebra, and SQL. It also covers XML data including DTDs and XML Schema for validation, and the query and transformation languages XPath, XQuery, and XSLT. The course includes database design in UML, and relational design principles based on dependencies and normal forms. Many additional key database topics from the design and application-building perspective are also covered: indexes, views, transactions, authorization, integrity constraints, triggers, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), and emerging "NoSQL" systems.

Check out the introductory video here:

Stanford Machine Learning Class

Similar to the Stanford University's AI Class, Prof. Andrew Ng, Director of Stanford's AI Lab, is also offering Machine Learning Class to the public. Sign up the class here: http://www.ml-class.com/

Below is the course description:
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include:
(i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks).
(ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning).
(iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI).
(iv) Reinforcement learning.
The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas.

Check out the introductory video here: