2012 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award

CSE UG students CHEN Qifeng and LI Yuliang won the 1st place and the 3rd place respectively in the 2012 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award Competition.

Last year our UG student CHAN Yun Kwan Emprise was awarded the 1st place in the same competition under the supervision of Prof DY Yeung. This year the championship again goes to CSE. CHEN Qifeng was awarded the championship with his project "KNN Matting" supervised by Prof CK TANG. This paper describes a general alpha matting approach for the simultaneous extraction of multiple image layers; each layer may have disjoint segments for material matting not limited to foreground mattes typical of natural image matting. The estimated alphas also satisfy the summation constraint. One application of this paper is to replace the background easily. The paper is accepted by CVPR 2012 and Qifeng will join the conference in providence, Rhode Island, USA in June. Qifeng has just accepted a PhD offer from Stanford University.

LI Yuliang won the 3rd place with his project "Mining Generalized Order-Preserving SubMatrices from Gene Expression Data" supervised by Prof Wilfred NG. The submatrix mining problems, which are also known as biclustering, have been extensively studied. A submatrix pattern consists of a set of rows that shares common behaviour across a set of columns, which reveals interesting local correlations in the data matrix. The project focuses on the Order-Preserving SubMatrix (OPSM) pattern which is previously shown to be an effective tool for analyzing gene expression data. The OPSM pattern is generalized in three directions. First, the definition of OPSM pattern was relaxed by allowing a reasonable amount of fluctuation inside the pattern so that it becomes more robust in noisy gene data. Second, the data matrix was generalized to allow continuous distribution so that it can be applied to application with uncertain data like RFID tracking. Finally, the model was generalized to the mine OPSM patterns from recommender system with large and sparse rating matrices by allowing missing entries in the OPSM patterns which can be mined by an innovative fast heuristic algorithm.

The award presentation ceremony was held on 19 April 2012 at HKUST.

CHEN Qifeng at the Award Presentation Ceremony

President CHAN and CHEN Qifeng (from left to right) at the Award Presentation Ceremony