Prof. Mohd Zaid Bin Abdullah
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Prof. M. Z. Abdullah graduated from Universiti
Sains Malaysia (USM) with a B. App. Sc. degree
in Electronic in 1986 before joining Hitachi
Semiconductor as a test engineer. In 1989, he
commenced an M.Sc. in Instrument Design and
Application at University of Manchester
Institute of Science and Technology, UK. He
remained in Manchester conducting research in
Electrical Impedance Tomography at the same
university, and received his Ph.D. degree in
1993. He joined USM in the same year. His
research interests include microwave tomography,
digital imaging, and ultra wide band sensing. He
has published numerous research articles in
international journals and conference
proceedings. One of his papers was awarded The
Senior Moulton medal for the best article
published by the Institute of Chemical
Engineering in 2002. Presently he is director of
the Collaborative Microelectronic Design
Excellence Centre (CEDEC), Universiti Sains
Malaysia.
Speech Title: "Tomgraphic Imaging with
Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) Sensors"
Abstract: One fundamental weakness of microwave
imaging is resolution. Good resolution demands a
small wavelength and therefore high frequency.
Higher frequencies, in the other hand, are
attenuated more rapidly, and the adequate depth of
penetration dictates a low frequency, no higher than
5 MHz. This is the main problem that plagues almost
all microwave systems. The second weakness is small
field of view resulting from the non-availability at
this time of an efficient miniturised type microwave
sensor with large bandwidth. This problem is
particularly chronic in organ sensing where at this
point and except for specialised area, this type of
application requires the size of antenna to be
relatively small compared to the field of view. The
third drawback is related to the inherent multiple
scaterring effect. This requires very complicated
image reconstruction algorithm and advanced signal
processing technique. Currently, most algorithms are
based on the beam-forming methods such as the Delay
and Sum (DAS) or its variants. The appealing
features of this method lies in its simplicity and
computational efficiency. However, it only produces
approximate solution since the field data is lost
due to the linearisation of the inversion
procedures. All these problems put the microwave
system at a disadvantage. The advent of ultra wide
band (UWB) technology and high frequency dielectric
resonator antenna (DRA) stimulated new interest in
this field as its potential for new applications was
recognised. This keynote addresses the development
of UWB research at USM, focusing on two potential
applications – breast cancer detection and
through-the-wall-imaging.
Prof. Taesung Park
Seoul National University, South Korea
Prof. Taesung Park received his B.S. and M.S.
degrees in Statistics from Seoul National
University (SNU), Korea in 1984 and 1986,
respectively and received his Ph.D. degree in
Biostatistics from the University of Michigan in
1990. From Aug. 1991 to Aug. 1992, he worked as
a visiting scientist at the NIH, USA. From Sep.
2002 to Aug. 2003, he was a visiting professor
at the University of Pittsburgh. From Sep. 2009
to Aug. 2010, he was a visiting professor in
Department of Biostatistics at the University of
Washington. From Sep. 1999 to Sep. 2001, he
worked as an associate professor in Department
of Statistics at SNU. Since Oct. 2001 he worked
as a professor and currently the Director of the
Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Lab. at SNU. He
served as the chair of the bioinformatics
Program from Apr. 2005 to Mar. 2008, and the
chair of Department of Statistics of SNU from
Sep. 2007 and Aug. 2009. He has served editorial
board members and associate editors for the
international journals including Genetic
Epidemiology, Computational Statistics and Data
Analysis, Biometrical Journal, and International
journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics. His
research areas include microarray data analysis,
GWAS, gene-gene interaction analysis, and
statistical genetics.
Prof. Francis Y. L. Chin
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Prof. Francis Y. L. Chin received his B.A.Sc.
degree from the University of Toronto in 1972,
and his M.S., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from
Princeton University in 1974, 1975, and 1976,
respectively. Prior to joining The University of
Hong Kong (HKU) in 1985, he had taught at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the
University of California, San Diego; the
University of Alberta; the Chinese University of
Hong Kong; and the University of Texas at
Dallas. Professor Chin was the Chair of the
Department of Computer Science at HKU and was
the founding Head of the Department from its
establishment until December 31, 1999. From 2002
until July 31, 2006, he had served as the
Associate Dean of the Graduate School. From 2007
to his retirement from HKU in 2015, Prof Chin
had served as an Associate Dean of the Faculty
of Engineering. Professor Chin is an IEEE Fellow
and his research interests include design and
analysis of algorithms, machine learning, and
bioinformatics including Motif-finding (Motif
discovery) and De Novo genome assembly (IDBA).
Professor Chin is now an Emeritus Professor of
The University of Hong Kong.
Speech Title: "Metagenomic Binning of
Next-Generation Sequence (NGS) Reads"
Abstract: Next-generation sequencing (NGS)
technologies allow the sequencing of microbial
communities directly from the environment without
prior culturing. The output of environmental DNA
sequencing consists of many reads from genomes of
different unknown species, making the clustering
together reads from the same (or similar) species
(also known as binning) a crucial step. Metagenomic
binning remains an important topic in Metagenomic
analysis. The difficulties of the unsupervised
binning methods for NGS reads are due to the
following factors: (1) the lack of reference
genomes; (2) uneven abundance ratio of species
(especially with some extremely low-abundance
species); (3) short NGS reads; and (4) a large
number of species. In this talk, the possible
approaches for handling these difficulties will be
discussed.