EEE
NEws

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• A Great Addition
• Flattening the Competition
• Bending the Limits of Batteries
• New Adventures in Space
• A Smarter Eye for Trouble
• A New Way to See
• Finding Your Location...
• Getting Rid of Dark Spots
• Using Data to Fight Epilepsy
• Sequencing Life
• Lighting the Way Forward
• Robots to the Rescue
• The Fast Track to Smart Cars
• A Hub for Trailblazing Research
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Good engineering is the cornerstone of a successful city. As urban centres around the world grow larger and more crowded, engineering science and technology can better people’s lives by eliminating problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution and excessive energy use. over the years, Nanyang
Technological university’s school of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
(EEE) has sought out the best partners to help translate its research into products and services that can benefit not just Singapore, but also other countries near and far.
The school strives to develop strong research capability to address the complex challenges of the 21st century while raising the singapore’s profile as a topnotch research hub. well-equipped with state-ofthe-art facilities and more than 50 laboratories at 12 research centres, we have seen over 140 faculty members, 350 research staff, 2,800 undergraduate students and 1,000 graduate students who have made their choices of quality education at
EEE.
At the Centre for Bio Devices and signal Analysis (VALENS), for instance, our scientists are improving people’s health through research on laboratory-on-a-chip technologies, bio-imaging and neutral engineering. one team recently created
NeuroBrowser, a computer program that can help doctors more quickly and accurately diagnose epilepsy.
In the past year, our researchers at VIRTUS, the IC Design Centre of Excellence, developed a more environmentally-friendly way to print electronics that reduces chemical use and material waste. our satellite Research Centre (SaRC) also had a banner year. In December
2015, it launched two more satellites, including the VELoX-CI, singapore’s first climate-monitoring satellite.
Even as singapore continues to become a smart Nation that taps technology to empower citizens and improve lives, the school is collaborating with industry more to ensure its research is translated into useful products and services. we also launched a test-bed, with automotive semiconductors supplier
NXP, on vehicle-to-everything wireless communications technologies. These will lead to smarter vehicles that know how to avoid accidents and traffic congestion. The research will also bring EEE international visibility in
2019, when we showcase our work at the singapore-hosted world
Intelligent Transportation Congress.
To date, the EEE’s annualised research funding has exceeded
S$80 million. Our research has also been recognised by international organisations, and our Qs world ranking in the EEE discipline has climbed to the 7th spot in 2015.
This issue of EEE Research News outlines our research centres, and highlights some of our recent discoveries. As we continue to attract very competitive funding from singapore’s funding agencies, we will continue to push the boundaries of engineering for the benefit of singapore and beyond.

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In the future, you might be able to print electronic devices at home instead of buying them in stores.
Researchers at VIRTUS ,
IC Design Centre of Excellence have developed a new way to print complex electronic circuits and systems using fully-additive processes.
Their unique method is environmentally-friendly, lowcost and scalable compared to subtractive or mixed processes, and produces components with high semiconductor carrier-mobility.
Printed electronics are usually thin, light and flexible, and can be used for, say, intelligent labels that track if milk cartons have been stored in required temperature ranges.
The field is dominated by subtractive-based processes such as laser ablation, where lasers are used to remove material from a solid. These processes, however, require specialised and expensive l
equipment, use corrosive chemicals and squander material. other scientists’ attempts at fullyadditive processes, which involve only depositions onto a film, resulted in components with low printed semiconductor carrier-mobility, which would severely limit devices’ speed.
The EEE technique uses widelyavailable silver paste, which has high electrical and thermal conductivity, for electrodes. The silver electrode is dipped in pentafluorobenzenethiol solution which increases its work function and overcomes the low carrier-mobility problem.
The researchers also used slot die coating to print the semiconductor layer. This results in fewer crystal grain boundaries, which quickens electrons’ flow, further increasing devices’ speed.
The technique can print passive elements including capacitors, resistors, inductors and two metalinterconnect layers – to date, the only fully-additive process that can realise complex circuits and systems on flexible plastic films.
To demonstrate its commercial viability, the researchers printed one proposed and two conventional differential amplifiers, and a 4-bit digital-to-analog converter.
The team also developed a comprehensive printed transistor model that is simple, accurate and compatible with industry-standard integrated circuit electronic design automation tools. This model allows manufacturers to simulate potential printed transistors’ operation, which is crucial for to design practical printed electronic circuits.
The researchers showed that, by using an appropriate layout, the mismatch between printed transistors can be reduced to a relatively low 8%, despite variations of up to almost 40% between individual transistors.
Dr Ge Tong, a senior research fellow at EEE, said: “what manufacturers get from the simulator will be very close to what they get if they print the actual circuit.”

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Your future super-thin smart-phone with a holographic display function could have its roots in technology developed by Nanyang Technological university (NTu).
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Professor Liu Ai Qun and his team have created a tunable flat lens that can manipulate light in different, controllable ways. Product designers can use it to make devices such as cameras and microscopes thinner than they are now, and even experiment with smart-phone holographic displays.
Traditionally, lens-based devices use curved lenses that occupy more space. These bend light rays that pass through them to manipulate images, for example to make objects seem bigger or smaller. Each curved lens, however, cannot be changed after it is manufactured, so arrays of them are needed to work in tandem in, say, a camera for you to be able to zoom in and out before taking a picture.
Flat lenses make use of twodimensional metamolecules that can manipulate light rays, but these molecules also cannot be tuned once fabricated. other scientists’ workarounds, which involved combining the molecules with elements that can be manipulated, inevitably spoiled the properties that allowed the material to control light.
The EEE flat lens consists of an array of metallic rings that can be filled with liquid mercury, which has a low melting point and high electrical conductivity. Each ring is connected to pneumatic valves that can pump air into it and force mercury out, to change the mercury ring’s shape, say from a C to a u.
Professor Liu Ai Qun from EEE said that their flat lens can manipulate light in different, controllable ways due to the individually adjustable mercury rings. He said: “The lens has much potential for applications such as high-performance devices in telecommunications. In future, it will also enable other applications such as 3D holographic displays for mobile phones.”
The flat lens consist of a metallic ring array filled with liquid mercury

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The future of flexible smart phones and electronic newspapers that you can roll up and refresh could be closer than you think.
Professor Zhang Qing and his researchers have created two flexible anodes for lithium-ion batteries that are essential to developing bendable and foldable electronics.
Their anodes – which are battery components through which electricity flows from the battery into the device and vice versa – use titanium dioxide and soft silicon. when the researchers tested the anodes in flexible batteries, the batteries could be bent repeatedly without deforming or breaking. Bent or not, they could also power a lightemitting diode or LED – the building block of LED display screens on televisions and smart-phones.
Past flexible anodes by other scientists had weak flexibility, low rate capabilities, which means the batteries would take a long time to charge, and short cycle lives that would have doomed products to early retirement.
(a) Long term capacity retention of the as-developed TiO2 based flexible anode at a rate of 5 (blue) and 10 C (red). (b) An optical photograph of a red LED lightened by the flexible battery under folded states.

7 one of the EEE anodes comprises carbon nanowire structures coated with titanium dioxide. while titanium dioxide is low-cost, environmentallyfriendly and harmless, it has poor electronic conductivity – electrons that move and create an electricity current have to plod across the material.
The nanowire structure has numerous tiny cables each coated with a thin layer of titanium dioxide. The anode has a lot of titanium dioxide in total so the battery lasts longer before it becomes unusable, and it can charge quickly because the electrons travel only short distances in the thin titanium dioxide layers.
The other EEE anode has flexible plastic nanofibers coated with very electronic conductive nickel and then silicon, which can hold more charge per gram compared to traditional graphite anodes. The lightweight invention can also reduce a conventional battery’s weight by more than 20 percent.
Professor Zhang Qing from EEE said both anodes further flexible lithium-ion batteries’ development, adding: “They could be used in rollup displays, implantable medical devices and wearable devices.”
(a) Optical photographs of the developed soft silicon based flexible anode. (b) Optical photographs of a red LED lightening by a flexible battery under folded states. (c) Capacity retention of the developed soft silicon based anode.

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Look up into the night sky and you could be meeting the eyes of some of Nanyang Technological university’s (NTu) latest work.
Professor Low Kay soon and his team have launched two new satellites to monitor Earth’s climate, test new navigation and communications systems and evaluate hardware to better protect satellites’ memory.
VELoX-CI and VELoX-II are EEE’s fifth and sixth satellites since
2011, when its satellite Research
Centre (SaRC) launched the X-sat,
Singapore’s first locally-built satellite.
The two VELoXes hitchhiked on the Indian space Research organisation’s Polar satellite Launch
Vehicle, which was sent into space from India’s satish Dhawan space
Centre in December 2015.
The mini-fridge-sized, 123kg
VELoX-CI will orbit Earth for three years and gather data about Asia’s tropical weather and climate, such as its upper atmospheric temperature and humidity.
It will also test EEE’s new Global
Positioning system technology that can determine a satellite’s position and velocity more accurately, down to millimetres per second.
The smaller, 12kg VELoX-II carries an innovative data relay system by Singaporean firm Addvalue
Innovation. Traditional satellite communications systems that use radio signals require a line of sight, which means that a satellite would only be able to link to NTu, for example, when it is near singapore.
A satellite with the Addvalue system could contact NTu from anywhere in the world.
VELoX-II will also be used to evaluate new radiation-resistant hardware designed by EEE to protect data stored in a satellite’s memory. Energetic particles found in space and caused by cosmic rays and solar flares could erode satellites’ memory and lead to mission failures. The hardware is an integrated circuit that can detect and correct small errors in the memory.
Professor Low Kay soon, who is also the SaRC’s director, said the scientists are now working on a series of nano-satellites.
Their next one slated for space, called AOBA VELOX-III, will be launched by the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency in 2016.

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Go to most cities and you’ll find tens or hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras helping the authorities to keep the peace. The number of visual feeds – combined with their typical around-the-clock operation – is usually too high for government agencies to monitor at all times.
Now, Professor wang Gang and his researchers at the Rapid-
Rich Object Search (ROSE) Lab have developed revolutionary computer algorithms that can give law enforcement agencies a powerful helping hand. These algorithms can sift through cameras’ views, detect people even if they are partially hidden, track them across cameras and flag suspicious activity.
The researchers used deep machine learning techniques, where machines learn from massive datasets and past experience to better sort through incoming information and extract useful information from raw data. once trained, the software could monitor camera feeds on their own and alert security officers when needed (a surveillance scenario), or to search through video records to retrieve images of persons or objects of interest (a forensic scenario).
The software detects all of the people in a scene, even partly obscured ones, assigns a unique identifier to each person and tracks their movements. Even if there are
50 people in the camera’s view, the program can follow each one – crucial for monitoring popular places such as tourist spots. when a person steps out of the scene – say, to go into a shop – and reemerges later, the algorithms will recognise him or her and re-assign the same identifier, rather than a new one. They can also re-identify the person across multiple cameras and despite lighting changes that might alter their appearance.
Professor wang Gang from EEE said: “Let’s say a murder is
Probe Image - Query
Rank 1 committed, you see the culprit on camera 1, and you want nearby cameras to look for this person.
They might be looking onto places in shadow or bright sun, which will cause the person’s clothes to look different. The algorithms can still identify and track the person across cameras.”
Rank 2
Gallery Images - Retrieved
Rank 3 Rank 4 Rank 5
Search
Correct match retrieved at Rank 1.
Person re-identification
The algorithms can also recognise what people are doing, say if two people are fighting or just shaking hands. This will be useful for security officers. The software uses two different types of cameras’ information – typical RGB cameras and depth-sensing ones – to recognize an action or differentiate between similar ones.
The software can also be used to count crowds, analyse their behaviour and other purposes.
Professor wang said: “In future, intelligent systems will complement human effort on a larger scale. We believe this advancement is key to fulfilling the vision of a Smart Nation.”
Multiple pedestrian detection and tracking

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A new kind of eye in the sky could help people to scan the landscape, search for items and create maps even when fires and other problems lead to poor visibility.
Researchers and students at
EEE and Temasek Lab (TL@NTu) have formed a project team to develop a miniature synthetic aperture radar (sAR) system that can be mounted on small unmanned, multi-rotor aircraft to map the land and carry out search missions. Their invention overcomes such systems’ typical problems, does not require a runway and works even when visibility is poor, for example during large fires.
A sAR system emits radio wave pulses, records the echoes after they hit the ground or target, and measures the time lapsed to determine the distance to the target.
Mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (uAV), it uses data from successive pulses to build images of the landscape. unlike optical cameras, it works in any weather and at any time.
while multi-rotor uAVs are low-cost, easy to build and control and do not need runways to take off and land
– making them useful during poor visibility when runways are unsafe
– their small size and light weight means they are easily perturbed by wind and can drift from desired flight paths. Such unintended motion introduces range migration and phase errors that cause blurry or smeared images.
The project team found that motion sensors can be used to correct drift errors, and their field trials also showed that a combination of phase gradient autofocus (PGA) and prominent point target techniques can compensate for phase errors and refocus images.
Their system also uses linear frequency modulation continuous waves that requires simpler hardware and less transmission power, and multi-look processing
– taking several “looks” at each target and averaging the results – to reduce speckling in the images.
It weighs just 4.5kg, including the sAR transmitter, receiver, antennas, batteries and a mini-personal computer for control and data streaming.
The project team said: “The system’s performance has been demonstrated through field trials.
It can provide robust imaging for day and night-time searches, rescue missions and even scans for suspicious items. The technology’s second generation will bring further improvements to the image quality.”
A close-up of the rotor-based SAR radar

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For infrastructure-based applications: at least 5 times reduction in the number of RNs required
Emergency responders such as firemen, policemen and disaster rescue workers could soon use a powerful new tool to locate one another as well as survivors during missions.
Prof Tan soon Yim at Centre for Infocomm Technology
(INFINITUS) has come up with a Real-Time Localisation (RTL) system that drastically reduces the amount of hardware needed and works even in environments filled with typical signal-blocking obstacles. Their revolutionary technology could be used in rescue and counter-terrorism missions, and in places without
Global Positioning system (GPs) signals, such as tunnels.
Two localisation techniques are often used in cities and buildings. one method uses reference nodes installed at known locations to pinpoint mobile nodes carried by people or objects. This system, however, usually requires at least three reference nodes to have line of sight to the mobile node, so many reference nodes must be installed.
The other technique, called
“fingerprinting”, does not need sightlines between the reference and mobile nodes, but users must have prior knowledge of the characteristics of the signals passing between the nodes. They must also calibrate the data for different environments.
Both techniques are impractical for emergency missions, such as riot control and search-and-rescue situations, as the environments are usually unknown to the responders and pre-installing reference nodes is not feasible.
The school system consists of mobile nodes that use antenna array to send and receive microwave signals even through obstacles such as walls. Each node has four commercial, off-the-shelf Wi-FI antennas, making any two nodes a multiple input and multiple output localisation system.
In buildings, just one node is needed as the reference, compared to existing techniques that use at least five times as many reference nodes. Emergency responders can also use the mobile nodes to track one another. The system pinpoints locations within 1m accuracy.
With some configuration, the system can also locate unknown wireless signal emitters within 1m accuracy, to find, say, trapped victims or terrorists using remotedetonation devices. Professor Tan soon Yim added: “Our technology is especially useful in GPS-denied environments, for vehicle tracking and in malls to enhance the shopping experience.”
For infrastructure-less applications: two MNs can locate each other in unknown environment without any pre-installed RN

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out, dark spot! A new computer program by Nanyang Technological university (NTu) could help to erase literal dark patches on people’s health.
Professor Lin Zhiping and
Professor ser wee at Centre for
Bio Devices and signal Analysis
(VALENS) have developed an image processing technique to help doctors better assess patients with melasma, a skin disease that causes dark patches on the face, and determine their treatment’s effectiveness.
Melasma affects millions of people, but dermatologists currently manually examine the patients, which means the diagnosis and treatment depends on the clinicians’ experience and is subjective.
The EEE image processing technique objectively analyses images of patients’ faces, and produces a Melasma Area And severity Index based on the percentage and darkness of the melasma regions.
The researchers combined global and local thresholding, two techniques used to segment images, for their hybrid thresholding method.
Global thresholding looks at the image as a whole and selects a brightness threshold to divide all pixels into two categories – brighter or darker than the threshold. This is useful for picking out areas that are distinctly darker than others, such as very dark melasma regions.
The method, however, can mistakenly disregard small melasma spots as image noises. It can also be misled if the face is unevenly lit, since shadows cast by, say, the nose can artificially darken some areas.
Local thresholding compensates for such errors. Each pixel is compared to its neighbours in a preset area before a threshold is set to categorise it. Dividing the image into multiple overlapping areas means each one is more evenly lit even with shadows across the face.
Professor Lin Zhiping from EEE said local thresholding also has weaknesses. If a preset area has little internal variation – for example, if it is entirely within an even melasma region – the technique can misclassify it since there are few or no different pixels for comparison.
He said: “We combined both methods for a better result, and our work can help patients get better diagnoses and treatment.”
Input image Segmented image

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Epilepsy patients can take heart
– a new invention by Nanyang
Technological university scientists could help doctors to ease or even cure their disease.
Professor Justin Dauwels and his team have created an automated program to help neurologists to locate seizure onset zones in epilepsy patients’ brains. Their breakthrough could lead to more effective surgical therapy that reduces or stops seizures.
Epilepsy, characterized by recurring, unprovoked seizures, affects about
65 million people globally, but only about 70% are successfully treated with drugs that are the main form of treatment. Even then, the medication can cause substantial side effects. surgical therapy, such as the implanting of stimulation devices, can help patients, but surgeons need to know the location of the seizure onset zones (soZ). Currently, neurologists combine data from non-invasive procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and external electroencephalograms
(EEG) to locate the zones, but this may not be sufficient.
Intracranial EEG monitoring – including stereo-EEGs, where depth electrodes are surgically implanted in brain tissue to capture neural signals
– may be required, but since the seizures are hard to predict, it takes a long time to capture enough data. such procedures are long, invasive, costly and carry infection risks. working with neurologists from the united states’ Massachusetts
General Hospital and Harvard
Medical school, the EEE team developed an automated program that identifies the seizure onset zone
MRI with electrodes and color-coded predicted SOZ likelihood using just one hour’s recording of stereo-EEG, potentially reducing patients’ time in hospital.
The program looks at a combination of stereo-EEG features. where most EEG studies explore the correlation between one EEG feature and the zones, the
EEE researchers tested numerous possible combinations of EEG features
– 255 in total – to find the one with the best localisation accuracy.
For example, electrodes in the seizure onset zone generally record more energy at low-frequencies, in addition to more high-frequency oscillations and interictal discharges.
The EEE two-step program identifies electrodes suspected to be in the zone, and then “zooms in” to check and rank each contact point of those electrodes. At this contact-point level, the program has 74% accuracy.
Professor Justin Dauwels said:
“The results demonstrate that stereo-EEG has great potential in localising the seizure onset zones, and a rigorous, quantitative method can be employed which moves significant clinical decisions from the subjective to objective.”
Depth electrode

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Fall sick in the future and you could get medicine tailored to your DNA.
Professor Yu Hao and his team have developed a more accurate and low-cost way to sequence a person’s DNA at high resolution, which will enable more personalised medicine.
Their technique relies on optical and chemical methods to identify
DNA’s different neuclotide bases – essentially the building blocks of DNA.
Currently, DNA sequencing is mostly done through optical or chemical methods. The optical method involves tagging DNA samples with chemicals that cause different neuclotide bases to give off different levels of fluorescence.
The machines that carry out this work, however, are very large and cost about us$10 million (s$14.3 million) each.
During the chemical method, DNA molecules are attached to microbeads, which are then distributed into wells on the surface of a chip. The wells are then flooded sequentially with each of the four A, T, C and G neuclotides. whenever the DNA on the microbead incorporates the neuclotide, it releases hydrogen ions. sensors read the changes in each well’s power of hydrogen, or pH, value to identify the
DNA’s neuclotide bases.
The machines used in the chemical method, however, cannot tell whether a microbead was deposited into a well. Even if a well is accidentally empty, the machine will still report a pH value for it due to unwanted signals from neighbouring wells, causing inaccuracies in the DNA sequencing.
The EEE researchers’ sequencer uses the chemical method, but adds a photodiode which looks for shadows cast by the microbead in each well under a white light source.
If there is no shadow – and hence no microbead – the sequencer does not report a pH value for that well.
The EEE technology is also more accurate and able to determine pH values down to 0.01 pH resolution, compared to the traditional chemical method’s 0.1 pH resolution.
Professor Yu Hao from EEE added that the sequencer, which is a 1cmby-1cm integrated circuit chip, costs just a few hundred dollars each. He said: “This will be a boon to cancer patients and people fighting other diseases.”
DNA sequencing with ISFET sensor; pH-TVC readout structure.

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What do lasers, fibre-optic cables for Internet connections and some medical devices have in common?
The answer: they all use light.
over the years, researchers in singapore’s institutes of higher learning, Nanyang Technological university (NTu) and National university of singapore (Nus) have studied ways to create and control light, a field known as photonics, to find new uses for the versatile technologies and material in telecommunications, healthcare, robotics, the military, transport, space and other fields.
Now, a group of researchers led by NTu’s Photonics Institute have formed a consortium that will help coordinate the projects, consolidate the diverse research and ensure that the laboratory work makes the leap into commercial products and services that can help people.
The Lux Photonics Consortium, founded by nine academic researchers and 13 leading industry players, has won the backing of the National Research Foundation
(NRF), which has so far funded nine research programmes related to the group’s work.
For a start, the consortium will focus on five areas including optical and laser applications, lighting and displays, ptoelectronics and biophotonics, nanophotonics and metamaterials, and fibre technologies, which transmit data coded in a beam of light.
The Photonics Institute (TPI) at
Nanyang Technological university
(NTu) has already partnered
Technolite Singapore, a firm which supplies and installs lighting features for infrastructural projects, to improve light-emitting diodes or
LEDs for use in facades.
The Lux consortium has also planned workshops, seminars, short courses, conferences and networking events for people in the photonics field, and will publish newsletters to keep them abreast of news in academia and industry.
Looking farther afield, talks with the European Photonics Industry
Consortium (EPIC) is underway to boost cross-border collaborations between their members. Planned reciprocal trade visits will help the members better understand one another’s work and find commercial partners.
The consortium also plans to rope in other photonics research groups and industries in the region to become a regional network for academics and companies.

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The next time you check in your luggage at singapore’s Changi
Airport, robotic arms could take and load it onto a driverless vehicle, which would then transport the bag to the aircraft.
By 2018, one of the airport’s terminals is expected to pilot an almost fully automated baggage transfer system, which would reduce the manpower needed for the process.
Robots and autonomous systems that can make airports more
“intelligent”, survey disasterstricken zones and save lives
– these are the main research focuses at a laboratory managed by Nanyang Technological university (NTu) and singapore’s sT Engineering group.
This innovation is just one of many projects at a S$53 million laboratory managed by Nanyang Technological university (NTu) and singapore’s sT Engineering group. The work is expected to help singapore and its neighbours cut costs, solve labour shortage problems and boost their economies.
The sT Engineering-NTu Corporate
Laboratory is housed in NTu’s school of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering (EEE) and focuses on two research areas: advanced robotics and autonomous systems to improve airport operations and disaster rescue efforts.
In the pipeline, for example, are small robots that can survey disaster-struck areas quickly and help look for survivors. The robots would use on-board sensors to create precise maps of the damaged areas so people can plan safer and more effective rescue missions.
They would also be able to enter potentially hazardous environments and search for signs of life.
unlike today’s robots, which must be remotely-controlled, these “smart” robots would be autonomous and enable crisis managers to deploy manpower and resources more productively.
The joint laboratory will have more than 100 researchers and staff at full capacity, including PhD students from NTu and engineers from sT
Engineering.
The inventions are also expected to be used in healthcare, transport, security and urban development, and help singapore realise its ambition to be a “smart Nation” powered by next-generation technology.
“The lab aims to be a leading research and development hub for intelligent unmanned systems with the goal to commercialise at least 10 technologies within five years”
Prof wang Danwei, school of EEE

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Imagine a future where cars can “talk” to one another to avoid accidents and figure out who has the right of way at junctions. You’d be able to get into your car, give it a location and then rest as it automatically sends you to your destination.
Nanyang Technological university (NTu), its school of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering (EEE) and Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors have joined forces to help make this a reality. They have set up a fouryear, s$22 million programme to study vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies that enable vehicles to communicate wirelessly with one another and with intelligent roadside infrastructure such as traffic lights.
Cars, motorcycles and other automobiles would get real-time alerts about road conditions and other vehicles, including their speeds and directions, long before dangers come into sight. According to the united states Department of
Transportation, V2X safety functions could have prevented more than 80 percent of multi-car vehicles.
NXP Executive VP of Technology & operations, Dr Hai wang said: “More roads, tunnels and overpasses will not solve global megacities’ traffic challenges in the long run.
Technologies like V2X can save lives by avoiding accidents and limiting congestion, travel time and carbon dioxide emissions.”
The NTu-NXP test bed will involve more than 100 vehicles and 50 roadside units in the NTu campus.
The researchers have installed some of the infrastructure and successfully tested several applications including accident and pedestrian crossing warnings.
They are now working on areas such as car convoying, where cars follow one another in a tight formation to optimise traffic flow, and protecting the Internet-connected vehicles against hackers.
“The rapid growth in vehicle populations needs to be matched by an efficient, safer and clean transportation system. Our collaboration will also pave the way to realising Singapore’s Smart
Mobility 2030 vision.”
Professor Peter Chong, Director of the
NTu-NXP smart Mobility Test bed

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Underlying our research philosophy is the focus of translating innovative concepts into reality with commercial value. The listing of the 12 research centres are as follows:
Information and communication engineering are priorities at INFINITUS, which has pioneered research in communications and network systems, sensors, cyber security, data analytics and other fields. Its recent projects include a test-bed for vehicle-toeverything wireless communications technologies, which will transform vehicles and create smarter transport systems. Its partners span local and international research and educational institutions and firms, such as Singapore
Economic Development Board, the
Asian Office of Aerospace Research and
Development, and NXP.
striving to uncover the human body’s workings and improve people’s health,
VALENS has four research priorities: labon-a-chip; bio-imaging; e-Health, which includes wearable devices to monitor health; and neurotechnology, where scientists develop methods to detect and predict neurological disorders. A recent collaboration with Massachusetts General
Hospital and Harvard Medical school, for instance, resulted in a computer program to help doctors quickly diagnose epilepsy and predict seizures. VALENS also works with many singaporean hospitals and international institutions.
www.valens.eee.ntu.edu.sg www.infinitus.eee.ntu.edu.sg
How can cities be lit more efficiently to reduce their contribution to climate change? At LUMINOUS!, researchers aim to improve artificial lighting’s energy use, to transform a sector that now makes up one-fifth of all electricity demand in the world. The scientists will investigate, for instance, excitons, which are particles that emit light as they decay. They are also developing high-efficiency LED lighting through innovative materials and fabrication. LUMINOUS!’s partners include stanford university and the
California Institute of Technology. www.luminous.eee.ntu.edu.sg
NOVITAS, Centre of Micro-/Nanoelectronics, conducts research and development in micro/nanoelectronics.
Its 32 faculty members, 36 researchers and more than 50 PhD students’ research interests cover electronic material syntheses and characterizations, micro-/nano-electronic device design and fabrication, device performance evaluation, simulation and physical mechanism study, etc. NOVITAS collaborates extensively with local and global academic and industrial partners and it holds 52 on-going research projects with a total fund of S$40 million. www.novitas.eee.ntu.edu.sg
The science of light, and how to control it for various uses, is at the heart of OPTIMUS. Its research areas include optoelectronics which studies of electronics and light converge through semiconductor technologies, and biophotonics which uses light to image, detect and manipulate biological materials. One project, for instance, could give users a point-of-care compact device for non-invasive inspection of adulteration and contaminations for food safety and healthcare. OPTIMUS has also partnered many organisations such as
Harvard, MIT, Imperial College London,
AsTAR, and various companies. www.optimus.eee.ntu.edu.sg
An integrated circuit (IC, ‘microchips’) usually embodies millions of transistors and functions as the ‘brain’ of the myriad of electrical and electronic devices in our modern society – the major driver in humanity’s third wave of invention and economic disruption. Research at the
VIRTUS-IC Design Centre of Excellence encompasses most areas in IC design, ranging from contemporary areas to emerging areas, including organic/printed electronics on flexible substrates, the
Internet-of-Things, Terahertz circuitsand-systems, satellite electronics, III/Von-CMos, Point-of-Care devices, etc.
VIRTUS collaborates with major research universities, including MIT, Caltech,
Cornell, etc., and with major industry players, including NXP, Infineon, Huawei,
Mediatek, etc. www.virtus.eee.ntu.sg

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Engineering systems among us are advancing to a level with high intelligence and efficiency. Urban traffic control, building air-conditioning systems, power grids, renewable energy systems, unmanned systems, are example of such complex engineering systems under research in the centre. EXQUISITUS develops core technologies to make these systems smarter and improve their performances. Main research areas include smart grids, power system control, renewable energy technologies, green cooling and air-conditioning technology, autonomous systems, machine learning, optimization, data analytics etc. over the years, EXQUISITUS has worked with many universities and organisations including MIT, uC Berkeley, Cambridge university, Technological university of
Munich, Rolls-Royce, singapore Power, sT Engineering, Land Transportation
Authority of singapore, et al.
www.exquisitus.eee.ntu.edu.sg
Though invisible to the naked eye, electromagnetic fields are all around us and can interfere with electronic devices.
EMERL – short for the Electromagnetics
Effects Research Laboratory – researches and measures electromagnetic effects on military and commercial electronic systems. spearheaded by NTu and singapore’s defence organisation Dso
National Laboratories, EMERL’s goal is to achieve the safe and innovative use of electromagnetic fields in new technologies. Its research could lead to increasingly compact electronic systems with high immunity to electromagnetic fields. www.emerl.eee.ntu.edu.sg
The satellite Research Centre or SaRC’s high-flying research includes putting into space Singapore’s first locally-built satellite, the X-sAT, in 2011. since then, it has developed and deployed five more satellites. Its researchers are also pushing the frontiers of satellite technology with innovations such as a fault-tolerant electronic system, precision navigation hardware, sensors, advanced control and electric propulsion system etc. In 2009, it started training students in various fields including advanced payload and satellite development from pico- to microsatellites. Its goal is to become a centre of excellence in small satellite technology.
www.sarc.eee.ntu.edu.sg
Optical fibres as thin as human hair can transmit vast quantities of data from one place to another. The Centre for optical
Fibre Technology (COFT) gathers fibrebased technology and applications in singapore under one roof hosted by the school of EEE, NTu. COFT has also partnered the overseas universities and research groups to develop ways to manufacture special optical fibres and related technologies. COFT’s goal is to become a hub for optical fibre fabrication and fibre-based devices research.
www.coft.eee.ntu.edu.sg/
In Internet searches, a picture could be worth a thousand words. The Rapid-
Rich Object Search or ROSE Laboratory is a collaboration between NTu and
China’s Peking university to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of imageenabled search from mobile devices or over the Internet. In particular, the lab is focusing on the classification, recognition, retrieval, and tracking of visual objects in images and videos. The ROSE Lab is also constructing a large structured object database, which will contain millions of images in domains related to tourism, e-commerce, humans and lifestyle and hobbies. It will work with Internet giants and industry leaders to commercialise its research.
rose.ntu.edu.sg
silicon is found in virtually all electronics and has transformed every aspect of our economy, including information technology, transportation, energy production, and national security. The silicon Technologies, Centre of Excellence or Si-COE aims to find new uses for it in sectors from multi-purpose healthcare wearables to energy efficient sensors for Internet of Things. Its four research focuses are the use of silicon in advanced sensors, new silicon chips intermixed with compound semiconductors, threedimensional integrated circuits, and innovative solutions to dissipate heat in microchips. It has established research partnership with multinational corporations like GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Infineon,
Hewlett Packard as well as Institute of
Microelectronics in singapore. www.sicoe.ntu.edu.sg

50 Nanyang Avenue, Block S1, Singapore 639798
Tel: (65) 6592 5402 | Fax: (65) 6791 2687 www.eee.ntu.edu.sg