Imagination to Reality:
Life as a Researcher
Limsoon Wong
Institute for Infocomm Research
Plan
• Why do I want to do research?
• What is life like as a researcher?
• What’s my work environment like?
Realising Dreams
Why do I want to do research?
Better diagnostics, benefit children
• Childhood leukaemia is a
heterogeneous disease
• Treatment is based on subtype
• 3 different tests and 4 different
experts are needed for diagnosis
 Curable in USA,
 fatal in Indonesia
A single platform diagnosis
based on gene expression
Predict epitopes, find vaccine targets
• Vaccines are often the only
solution for viral diseases
• Finding & developing effective
vaccine targets (epitopes) is
slow and expensive process
• Develop systems to recognize
protein peptides that bind
MHC molecules
• Develop systems to recognize
hot spots in viral antigens
Intelligent information extraction,
improve safety
• Benefits
• Extract chemical safety
information from Materials
Safety Data Sheets (MSDS)
• Check for conformance to
standards
– OHD: Check 100% of
MSDS (currently < 10%)
with same manpower
– Chemical Suppliers:
Savings in distribution of
MSDS as it is online
– End users of chemicals :
Better quality MSDS,
improved safety
Prevent drowning, save lives
• Drowning Early Warning System
• tracks people in dynamic aquatic conditions
• intelligently detect water crises situations
Let machines perceive as we do
• Perceptual visual quality according to
characteristics of human vision
Higher PSNR!
New perceptual metric perceives correctly.
Comparison with MOS (Mean Opinion
Score)
• Outperform metrics in ITU-T VQEG
test
• Adoption in video coding results in
efficiency & quality improvement
(other systems make compromise
betw. the two)
Pearson Correlation
Spearman
Correlation
PSNR metric
0.66
0.69
New metric
0.83
0.81
Better accuracy
Better consistency
Let machines listen as we do
Automatic speech recognition
PSTN
Business Logic
Text-to-speech
voice
Speech enhancement,
Noise reduction
Multilingual
voice mining,
Speech & dialogue
processing
Text categorization,
Natural language
processing
Semantic
outputs
To build a mobile audio industry
… analogous to the graphics industry
• Synthesis-directed analysis of sounds
– how would you model a lion’s roar?
• Algorithms for synthetic sound generation
• Tools for sound model automation and support
• Cross-platform audio synthesis engine with a small footprint and
low compute requirements
Make computers easier to use
• Abstraction of image content
allows interpretation and
matching in semantic space
Search photos by
visual keywords
• Visual query language allows
specification of what and
where
Make home videos more fun
• Select video frames
• Cut to music
• Decide on transitions
Turn home video into high
quality MTV automatically
Take search engines to the next level
• Search engines are getting
less useful than before
– too many hits
– not all relevant
– not “organized”
[Hierarchal clustering
from BIGontheNet] take
Google to a new level –
Yahoo! Finance
[p-zoom]
may have a
leg up on…
its
competitors
– Tech Web
News
by
“I like BigOnTheNet's
and Groxis's web
search categorization
technologies a lot” –
Chris Shipley on
WashingtonPost.com
One step closer to Omnipresence
• Wanted: A system of
networked wireless sensors
carried on autonomous
mobile nodes that are able to
operate in all kinds of terrain
• Challenge: To integrate
– localization systems
– mobile ad hoc networking
– distributed robotics.
The All Terrain Advanced
Network of Ubiquitous Mobile
Asynchronous Systems
Better phone service for remote
arctic villages
• Ad hoc networking for the
Village Radio system in
Canadian arctic
• Energy-efficient routing
protocol to improve the
Village Radio system
• Multi-path for robustness
• Protocol learns routes from
packets transmitted
• QoS beyond best effort
through multi-path routing
Bears pictures: Copyright 2002 Thomas D. Mangelsen, Inc.
Watch video any where,
any time, on any device!
Wireless Network
And improve
quality at the
same time!
Hide existence of files
• Defeat even attacker who:
– is familiar with system
– has full access to sytem
– lacks only the file access key
Doesn’t even want him
to know the file exists!
• Applications:
– External data/storage &
managed services
– Military & financial, where data
is so valuable that coercion is
likely
StegFS:
Steganographic File System
Protect authenticity and integrity
of data in a robust way
• Third Party Publication:
Sign Once, Verify Many
Ways
More intelligent CCTV,
improve homeland security
Behavior
Learning
Indoor &
Outdoor
CCTV
Crowd Behaviour Analysis
• Fighting
• Rioting
• Unusual crowding
Real-time notification
Scene/event analysis
Prioritised viewing
• Loitering
Event indexing
Bayesian Event
•
Mapping
Abandoning
object
• Potential theft
• People tracking
Improve sophistication of
our media industry
Existing
pains
“Intrusive” ads
•pops out during play!
Nonintrusive
virtual
contents
insertion
Non-intrusive insertions
•detects non-play segment
•non-interfering insertion
Tennis TV
•manual
Enhanced tennis TV
•auto-tracking
•super-resolution
Tagged to camera h/w
•costly
•done once at source
Software detection:
•performed any-time
•demographic Ads
•cheap
Increase competitiveness of our port
•
•
•
•
Container number recognition, berth planning, etc.
Handle >10 millions containers a year
Save $M for PSA per year
Reduce time-at-port from 3 days to 1 afternoon
Having Fun
What’s life like as a researcher?
Solving problems
Giving talks
…in a classroom
…in a conference
…at the Istana
Visiting places
siena
goldcoast
cairo
kiangju
beijing
copenhagen
tokyo
charmonix
Receiving awards
YSA’97
SYA’99
FEER AIA’03
Creating companies
And a dozen more!
Making friends all over the world
Building a team, building a future
Advancing ICT to benefit humanity
What is my work environment like?
A national research institute
•
BMRC
Advance Infocomm Technology
to benefit humanity and create
prosperity for S’pore
mission:
SERC
IMRE •
•
IME
DSI
IHPC
ICES
SIMTECH
size:
350 RSEs
1 paper a day, 1 patent a
week, 1 technology a month, 1
breakthru a year
performance:
Passion for innovation
•
•
•
•
•
Pioneer in video indexing & parsing systems
Pioneer in model-enhanced neuro-radiology
Pioneer in Asian language processing
Pioneer in immunoinformatics
Created the 1st robust container number recognition
system for the world’s busiest port
• Created the 1st video & music analysis system for
automatic production of high-quality MTV
Dedication to excellence
National
Technology
Award
2001
Lye Kin Mun
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
FEER Asian Innovation Gold Award 2003
TEC Innovator Award x2, 2003
Tan Kah Kee Young Inventor Gold Award 2003
Best Tech. Innovation Award, Biometrics 2002
IEE Hartree Premium Award, 2002
National Infocomm Award, 2002
National Technology Award, 2001
Error rate w/o Facestar
Best Technological
Innovation Award
Biometric 2002
FaceStar
TEC Innovator Award 2002
Drowning Early Warning System
10x reduced
error rate w/ Facestar
Impact of our people
• Companies with new Singapore R&D centres led and
staffed by I2R alumni
– Sybase Asian Development Centre
– InfoTalk (National Infocomm Award winner)
• Companies with (regional) CEO/CTOs who are I2R
alumni
– Alcatel, SurfGold, BEX, Ecquaria, ...
Impact of our work
3G WCDMA protocol stack based on 3GPP specs
Smart antenna algorithms & packet access protocols
Wideband & passive RFID systems
Novel systems architecture for 802.11a wireless LAN IC
Fast & accurate Fingerprint recognition system
Dragon – DNA gene transcription start site recogniser
Gene Expression - paediatric leukaemia prediction
Fast MPEG4 compression
Cryptographic systems for e-Security solutions
Service creation, translation and management
Siemens & STM
NTT DoCoMo
Toppan
IBM
Infineon Tech
Biobase
St. Jude CR Hospital
ISO/IEC Standards
Computer Associates
National Semiconductor
I2R Building
La Tasca, a place for relaxation
Typical office & lab
Some lab outings
‘04
‘01
‘02
‘02
‘01
‘03
Thank
you
& become
a researcher!