Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): CityU HKIDS CSIE 10-year Anniversary Forum

The CityU Hong Kong Institute for Data Science (HKIDS) and Centre for Systems Informatics Engineering (CSIE) organized this forum to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the foundation of Centre for Systems Informatics Engineering (CSIE) on 11^th Aug 2021. The forum features keynote speech and invited talks complemented by short presentations of selected members of the CSIE. In the beginning, Prof. S. Joe Qin (Director of Hong Kong Institute for Data Science and Centre forSystems Informatics Engineering; Dean and Chair Professor, School of Data Science, CityU) gave welcome remarks.

Then Prof. Qin introduced the focus areas of CSIE including Health Informatics, Big Data Analytics & Intelligent Systems, Prognostics & System Health Management, as well as, Energy Informatics & Civil Engineering.

Prof. Michael M Yang (Vice‐President (Research & Technology), Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Biomedical Sciences, CityU) gave an opening remark and he briefed research of HKIDS and HKTech 300.

Prof. Tianyou Chai (Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, Northeastern University) was the keynote speaker and his topic entitled “CPS Driven Control System”. He introduced the hybrid simulation system and industrial application for CPS driven control system in this talk.

Firstly, he briefed the background that a big problem in China industry on high energy consumption and large resource usage. Most of them were manual operation and control.

Then he mentioned the functions of CPS driven control system for energy-intensive equipment including setpoint control, tracking control, self-optimized tuning, remote and mobile monitoring for operating condition.

After that he demonstrated a melting process as example using CPS driven control system and its control problem was that energy consumption per ton (ECPT) of fused magnesia of every batch furnace should be as small as possible. Some existing problems were semi-melting, overheating, abnormal feeding and abnormal exhausting, etc.

Prof. Chai said they employed hardware platform of practical control system and hybrid simulation system. Then they simulated the energy consumption using both hardware and software platform of CPS driven control system.

Finally, Prof. Chai concluded the control impact on energy consumption reduced by 6.67% that CPS driven control system can effectively achieve energy conservation and emission reduction for energy-intensive equipment.

The second speaker was Prof. Kwok L. Tsui (Professor, Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) and his presentation title was “Healthcare and Public Health Surveillance and Monitoring”. In the beginning, Prof. Tsui briefed his happy memory on CSIE and different projects he involved.

Then he briefed the real-time health surveillance and management involved for steps and they were Health Surveillance, Prevention & Preparedness Plan, Intelligent & Integrated Healthcare System, and Individual-based Health Management System.

After that Prof. Tsui introduced the challenge on Elderly Care such as lack of enough capacity and resource in both hospital care and community care services. He proposed an interdisciplinary research approach on integrated smart elderly care.

Lastly, he showed the latest research in fall detection and classification for human factors model of person-task-equipment system.

The third speaker was Prof. Furong Gao (Chair Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and his topic named “Big Data and Automation in Polymer Processing”.

Firstly, Prof. Gao introduced batch process of injection molding and its process cycle. Its natures included multiplicity of products, repeatability, phase-switching and varying quality requirement.

Then he briefed his research focus including batch process automation. One of his key research named “Intelligent System for Continuous and Batch Hybrid Manufacturing of Polymer Products”.

Finally, he mentioned intelligent system for the hybrid manufacturing was the key for stable, efficient, customized production of plastic parts. He also briefed 5 projects below at the end.

Project 1 - Mechanism (知): Explore extrusion mixing and injection molding mechanisms for quality and condition relations.

Project 2 - Sensing (感): Developing sensing and characterization technologies for process, state, and quality sensing.

Project 3 - Coupling (聯): Development of digital twins and establishment of multi—couplings for info, conditions and qualities.

Project 4 - Control (控): Develop multi-loop, multi-time optimization and control method for synchronized operation.

Project 5 - Integration & Demonstration (用): Integrate knowledge, sensing, coupling, control form a platform for intelligent hybrid processing.

The forth speaker was Prof. Eric Lee (Professor, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, CityU) and his title presented “Recent Researches and Modelling in Pedestrian Movement”. Study on pedestrian movement aimed to understand on crowd movement to prevent stampede accident.

Then he briefed some background of impatience on psychological area and converted the relevant psychological theories to equations for modelling using Cellular Automata (CA).

After that Prof. Lee explained that evacuees tend to break down their well-coordinated motion and adopt competitive egress behavior when they were confronting life-endangering situations that significantly influenced crowd dynamics and overall evacuation time. Some simulation results were showed.

Lastly, Prof. Lee briefed synchronization of motion in pedestrian flow using single-file crowd motion experiments. But it prohibited evacuation experiment during Covid-19 period.

Afternoon session:

Prof. Min Xie (Chair Professor, Department of Advanced Design and Systems Engineering/School of Data Science, CityU) was the fifth speaker and his topic named “System Safety and Reliability in the Big Data Era”.

Firstly he introduced his research project including AI, Big Data and Application in Autonomous Driving since 2018.

After that Prof. Xie explained AI in system reliability and predictive maintenance, and compared traditional and non-traditional reliability analysis methods.

Lastly, he introduced his new book named Cyber-Physical Distributed Systems and would be published in next month.

The sixth speaker was Dr Zijun Zhang (Associate Professor, School of Data Science, CityU) and his presentation entitled “The Computer Vision Assisted Analytics of Railway Infrastructure Condition Inspections”.

Dr. Zhang briefed four specific railway inspection problems including track crack and defects detection, component inspection and foreign object detection. Those problem could be solved using computer vision assisted analytics.

Then he demonstrated different data using image acquisition system which mounted on the bottom of the train. Finally he concluded that the feasibility of applying deep learning techniques to enable different automated inspection tasks were explored.

The seventh speaker was Dr Qingpeng Zhang (Associate Professor, School of Data Science, CityU) and his topic was “Knowledge‐enhanced Explainable Suicide Prediction”. He said suicide is the fourth leading cause of death in 15-19 year olds.

Then Dr. Zhang introduced the explainability of suicide risk prediction model using knowledge graph. He also proposed an end-to-end explainable risk prediction model namely the Comorbidity Knowledge-Aware (CKA) model. Model input is a patient-disease pair and model output is the risk that patient develops the disease in the future.

Finally, he demonstrated some results through knowledge graph embedding explanations.

Dr Lishuai Li (Assistant Professor, School of Data Science, CityU) was the last speaker and her topic entitled “Data Science Enabled Operations Management and Planning Methods in Air Transportation Systems”.

Firstly, She briefed the background of aviation sector and focused on interdisciplinary research of Data Science and Intelligent Air Transportation System.

One of key cost of air transportation is fuel so that the research on data intelligence and fuel efficiency was performed and got a good prediction results through deep learning.