RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 1997 Research Projects Computing Sciences, Information Technology and Applied Mathematics
Research Projects Arts and Languages Administrative, Business and Social Studies Biological Sciences Physical Sciences Education Medicine, Dentistry and Health: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Civil and Structural Engineering Electrical and Electronic Engineering Computing Sciences, Information Technology and Applied Mathematics Mechanical, Production and Industrial Engineering including Textiles and Clothing Architecture, Surveying, Urban Planning and Urban Studies Law	NUMERICAL RANGES To generalize some known results in numerical ranges and related topics. Investigator: Professor Y.H. Au-Yeung Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1987.09 MAN-MACHINE COMMUNICATION IN PUTONGHUA To develop the technologies of speech recognition and synthesis, applied to the Chinese language. Investigator: Professor C. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.07 ON-LINE RECOGNITION OF CURSIVELY HAND-WRITTEN CHINESE CHARACTERS To develop a software recognizer capable of recognizing highly cursive hand-written Chinese characters written on a special tablet in order to capture the stroke order and direction information. The vocabulary is 4574 character strong. Investigator: Professor C. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 RECOGNIZING HAND WRITTEN CHINESE CHARACTERS BY CONTEXTUAL VECTOR QUANTIZATION To find an effective and efficient means of representing hand writtne Chinese characters for recognition purpose; to apply the Markov Random Field Theory on the general problem of recognizing complex images of great variance. Investigators: Professor C. Chan (Principal) Dr. Q. Huo Departments: Computer Science ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratory Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 FONT SERVERS IN A DISTRIBUTED HETEROGENEOUS CHINESE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT To design and develop a font server system in a distributed heterogeneous Chinese computing environment. Investigators: Dr. H.W. Chan (Principal) Dr. W.H. Cheung Dr. W.K. Kan Departments: Computer Science Computer Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1992.07 MULTILINGUAL FONT SERVICE IN X WINDOW SYSTEM To design a new font service framework in X which is scaleable for cross-platform multilingual support. Investigator: Dr. H.W. Chan Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1997.07 A CHINESE DOCUMENT PROCESSING SYSTEM To build an integrated Chinese document processing system based on our work in Chinese character recognition. The system will first scan a Chinese document into the system. The system will then divide the document into text region and graphics regio The graphics region will be extracted out and stored in commonly usable form, such as TIFF or EPS format. The text region will be passed to a character recognizer to recognize the characters and saved in Chinese codes. Essential information, such aont and formatting of the document, is also extracted and stored, so that it can be reconstructed in a format that can be read by word processors. Investigator: Dr. K.P. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Croucher Foundation Starting date: 1994.10 MACHINE LEARNING OF FUZZY-ATTRIBUTE GRAPH REPRESENTATION To develop algorithms to build models and class hierarchy from a set of fuzzy examples for structural pattern recognition. Efficient ways of matching between object in a complex scene and the models and class hierarchy obtained will also be developed. Investigator: Dr. K.P. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1995.07 DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF PERFECT RECONSTRUCTION LINEAR-PHASE FILTER BANKS FOR SUBBAND IMAGE CODING To derive algorithms to determine the appropriate symmetric structures, the corresponding symmetric extension methods, and the design of perfect-reconstruction linear-phase filter banks. Investigator: Dr. K.P. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.01 A PRINTED CHINESE DOCUMENT RECOGNITION AND TRANSLATION SYSTEM FOR OFFICE AUTOMATION To build a system that will perform segmentation and recognition on a printed document and translate the document into an English one based on knowledge based translation and human intervention. Investigator: Dr. K.P. Chan Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Industry Dept. of Hong Kong Government :- Industrial Support Fund Starting date: 1996.06 NEW CRITERIA FOR OPTIMAL DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS WITH MIXTURES To investigate: (1) optimal designs for various mixture models in terms of various optimality criteria usually contains a large portion of support points on the boundary of the design space, which is undesirable because the experimenter usually want to know the behaviour of the response in the interior of the design space as well. (2) if model-robust designs cannot be found, what design procedure will be the most efficient? (3) most past work done on optimal design is emphasised on estimation of coefficients in the response model. Very few work has been done on the more important and practical problem of finding designs for an optimal value (say the maximum) of the response function. (4) if several response functions are considered simultaneously in decision making, which is usually the case, what is the "most suitable" objective function for an optimal design experimental design? Investigators: Dr. P.L.Y. Chan (Principal) Professor Y. Guan Departments: Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Mathematics, Northeastern University, People's Republic of China Source of funding: RGC Fundable Projects (Block Grant Funded) Starting date: 1996.10 NEW INDUCTION TECHNIQUES FOR KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES Knowledge discovery is the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data. The project undertakes to apply the new technique "Attribute-Oriented Induction" to new domain of applications. It will be applied to some production databases available locally in Hong Kong for experimental purpose. This research has great application values in area like consumer behaviour study, medical diagnosis, and geographical information system. Investigators: Dr. D.W.L. Cheung (Principal) Dr. J. Han Dr. V.T.Y. Ng Departments: Computer Science Computer, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.10 MINING ASSOCIATION RULES IN DISTRIBUTED DATABASES To study the problem of mining association rules in distributed databases. The goal includes (1) design efficient distributed algorithms to solve the mining problem; (2) implement the different algorithms to investigate their performance characteristics; (3) extend the study to multidatabases. Investigator: Dr. D.W.L. Cheung Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 DISCOVERY AND MAINTENANCE OF ASSOCIATION RULES IN LARGE DATABASES To design efficient algorithms for mining different types of rules or patterns, and, to update, maintain and manage the rules discovered. Investigators: Dr. D.W.L. Cheung (Principal) Dr. J. Han Dr. V.T.Y. Ng Departments: Computer Science Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Computing Science, Simon Fraser University Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.10 ESTABLISH A DISTRIBUTED HETEROGENEOUS EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT To develop a network transparent distribute execution environment for a local area network which consist of different types of machines such as IBM PC and Macintosh. Investigator: Dr. W.H. Cheung Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1991.04 DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSPORT MECHANISM FOR DELIVERING MULTI-MEDIA DATA To study the design and implementation issues of a transport-layer protocol and related operating system mechanisms for delivering large volume of multi-media data on a high-bandwidth local area network. Investigator: Dr. W.H. Cheung Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1994.07 Completion date: 1997.06 VARIATIONAL PROBLEMS VIA EXTERIOR DIFFERENTIAL SYSTEMS To generalize Griffiths’ formalism of the calculus of variations in one variable via the theory and techniques of exterior differential systems to the case of several variables; and to apply the formalism or its generalizations to solve certain geometrical and/or physical problems. Investigator: Dr. W.S. Cheung Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1988.05 INTEGRAL INEQUALITIES To investigate and improve integral inequalities like Opial's Inequalities, Poincare Inequalities, Gronwall-Bellman Inequalities, and the like which are basic tools for the study of both qualitative and quantitative properties of solutions of many differential equations. Investigator: Dr. W.S. Cheung Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1991.09 BOUNDED DOMAINS IN N-DIMENSIONAL COMPLEX SPACES To study the behaviour and properties of certain intrinsic measures on bounded domains in an n-dimensional euclidean space. Investigators: Dr. W.S. Cheung (Principal) Professor B. Wong Departments: Mathematics Mathematics, University of California, Riverside, U.S.A. Starting date: 1991.09 MULTIRESOLUTION TECHNIQUE AND THEORY FOR IMAGE PYRAMIDS To characterize problems that can be effectively solved by the multi-resolution technique; to design optimal kernels for local processing and resolution reduction which will retain as much information of specific kinds as possible; to apply results of the above to various applications and study the effectiveness of such solutions. Investigators: Professor F.Y.L. Chin (Principal) Dr. A.K.O. Choi Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants University Grants Committee Starting date: 1990.05 Completion date: 1996.12 ROUTING WITH UNSPECIFIED DESTINATIONS To determine whether there exists a valid routing solution for a given S and T; to find the optimal routing if there exists a valid solution, otherwise, find the best possible solution; to consider the above two problems when T is the vertices of a fi size grid. Investigator: Professor F.Y.L. Chin Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1994.07 PROTOTYPE REAL TIME MPEG 2-COMPATIBLE MOVING PICTURE ENCODING SYSTEM To develop the core MPFG2 technology in terms of algorithms and implementation schemes; a prototype real-time MPEG-2 encoding system with a possibility of implementation of some algorithms on ASIC chips. Investigator: Professor F.Y.L. Chin Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Industry Dept. of Hong Kong Government :- Industrial Support Fund Starting date: 1995.04 MULTIRESOLUTION POLYGONAL / SUBDIVISION APPROXIMATION To address the problem of finding approximations to polygonal curves and planar subdivisions which are important and fundamental constructs in such areas as vision, image processing and pattern recognition, and geographical information systems (GIS). Investigator: Professor F.Y.L. Chin Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1997.01 1083 TELEPHONE DIRECTORY ENQUIRY SYSTEM To design and implement a telephone directory enquiry system using state of the art technology in main memory data base and distributed system. Investigators: Dr. K.P. Chow (Principal) Dr. D.W.L. Cheung Professor F.Y.L. Chin Dr. T.W. Lam Dr. W.W. Tsang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hewlett-Packard (Hong Kong) Ltd. and Hong Kong Telecom Starting date: 1995.07 Completion date: 1996.12 OPERATIONAL RESEARCH (OR) AND COMPUTING To investigate applied operational research such as optimization, mathematical modelling, facility location-allocation, scheduling and their computations; and mathematical methodologies such as discrete optimization, linear programming, networks and graphs. Investigator: Dr. S.C.K. Chu Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1985.09 ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS ON A MIMD SUPERCOMPUTER To experiment various engineering applications using the Meiko i860 Computing Surface Mini-supercomputer of the Faculty. Investigator: Dean Fac of Engineering Department: Faculty of Engineering Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1993.02 REAL-TIME DATABASE SYSTEMS To build a real-time database system prototype on which the various research ideas are implemented and tested. Investigator: Dr. B.C.M. Kao Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 OPTIMAL MODEL REDUCTION VIA STATE-SPACE PROJECTIONS To develop an optimal model reduction theory based on the parametrization of stable low-order projections of high-order linear systems; to implement the optimal model reduction theory through efficient and reliable numerical algorithms for some common error measures; to extend the approach to large-scale composite systems and bilinear systems. Investigators: Dr. J. Lam (Principal) Dr. W.Y. Yan Professor G.H. Yang Departments: Mechanical Engineering Northeaster University, Shenyang, People's Republic of China School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1997.01 APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS FOR BICONNECTIVITY To derive better sequential and parallel algorithms for approximating the smallest set of links to biconnect a communication netowrk. Investigator: Dr. T.W. Lam Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1995.07 Completion date: 1997.06 TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF GRAPH SEARCHING To study the time complexity and processor complexity of graph searching on parallel computers; to devise efficient algorithms for sequential computers to handle graphs which are too big to be stored in the memory and can only constructed implicitly. Investigators: Dr. T.W. Lam (Principal) Dr. H.F. Ting Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.09 DYNAMIC PATTERN MATCHING To design more efficient algorithms for matching a set of dynamically changing patterns. Investigator: Dr. T.W. Lam Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1997.07 PARALLEL PROCESSING FOR EFFICIENT PHOTOREALISTIC BUILDING WALKTHROUGHS To develop an efficient photorealistic walkthrough tool to facilitate the visualization and evaluation of buildings before they are constructed or modified. It will be achieved by the use of parallel processing to reduce the computational costs of the realistic rendering techniques of ray tracing and radiosity, and to manage the data of the complex scenes efficiently. Investigator: Dr. F.C.M. Lau Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Hung Hing Ying Physical Sciences Research Fund Starting date: 1992.12 DISTRIBUTED LOAD BALANCING IN MULTICOMPUTERS To study practical issues related to the Generalized dimension exchange (GDE) method for distributed load balancing in multicomputers and to implement a prototype on a real multicomputer. Investigator: Dr. F.C.M. Lau Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1994.07 LOAD BALANCING IN MULTICOMPUTERS To study the important problem of load balancing in multi-computers. Investigator: Dr. F.C.M. Lau Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 MESHES WITH EXPRESS LINKS (MEL) To study how the popular mesh architecture for parallel computing may be enhanced using extra point-to-point links. Investigator: Dr. F.C.M. Lau Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hung Hing Ying Physical Sciences Research Fund Starting date: 1997.01 THEORETICAL STUDY OF INTERVAL ROUTING To derive improved lower bounds for the 1-label interval routing scheme and the multi-label interval routing scheme. Investigator: Dr. F.C.M. Lau Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1997.07 PRIMES AND POWERS OF 2 To generalize the Linnik Theorem on the number of representations of a sufficiently large even number as the sum of two odd primes and some powers of 2. Investigator: Professor M.C. Liu Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1995.07 Completion date: 1997.08 BOUNDS FOR SMALL SOLUTIONS OF SOME DIOPHANTINE EQUATIONS To modify some new ideas and techniques developed recently by Heath-Brown and J.-R. Chen to obtain a good numerical bound for B.; to obtain good numerical bounds for some constants in several closely related problems. Investigator: Professor M.C. Liu Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 FIBRATION OF COMPACT KAHLER MANIFOLD VIA THE FUNDAMENTAL GROUP To show that a compact Kahler manifold with sufficiently large fundamental grup must be of positive algebraic dimension; to deduce complex-analytic properties of such Z. Investigator: Professor N. Mok Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.09 MATHEMATICAL THINKING AND HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Inspired by Leibniz' saying that "the art of discovery be promoted and its method known through illustrious examples", an attempt is made to develop undergraduate teaching material out of selected excerpts from memoirs of great mathematicians in the past, with emphasis on mathematical concepts involved, especially their evolution, and important aspects of mathematical thinking. Investigator: Professor M.K. Siu Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1987.01 AUTOCORRELATION PROPERTIES OF BINARY SEQUENCES AND ARRAYS Binary sequences and arrays find important applications in communication science and electrical engineering. In particular, their autocorrelation properties are of interest, and such study is intimately related to various other topics in combinatorial mathematics and abstract algebra. As the subject is vast, the study has a more specific (short-term) objective, viz. to study sequences with special form of auto-correlation function (periodic or aperiodic), especially their two-dimensional analogues. Investigator: Professor M.K. Siu Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1987.02 THE ROLE OF PROOF IN MATHEMATICS The project attempts to answer such questions as: what role does proof play in mathematics? Rigour vs. intuition? What sort of proof will enhance understanding? How should proof be treated in the teaching of mathematics? Is proof a way to discover new results or a mere verification? etc. Investigator: Professor M.K. Siu Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1988.01 TRADITIONAL CHINESE MATHEMATICS IN A BROADER HISTORICAL CONTEXT A better perspective on traditional Chinese mathematics can only be gained when its development is viewed against a broader socio-cultural background. Through careful document analysis we try to examine this issue. Investigators: Professor M.K. Siu (Principal) Dr. A.K. Volkov Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1997.05 STUDIES ON THE COMMUNICATION COMPLEXITY To develop techniques for deriving lower bounds on communication complexity; to design protocols with low communication complexity for some important distributed computing problems. Investigators: Dr. H.F. Ting (Principal) Dr. T.W. Lam Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.09 ROUTINGS ON FIBRE OPTIC NETWORKS To design and analysis algorithms which compute the optimal routes for sending messages in fibre-optic networks. Investigator: Dr. H.F. Ting Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS IN COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY To study a fundamental problem in computational biology, namely the maximum agreement subtree problem. Efficient algorithms for this problem finds great applications in Biology. Investigator: Dr. H.F. Ting Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1997.07 THE MEAN SQUARE FORMULA FOR THE RIEMANN ZETA-FUNCTION To study the asymptotic and oscillartory behaviour of E(T), the error term in the mean square formula for the Riemann zeta-function on the critical line. Similar problems for certain well-known error terms in analytic number theory will also be studied. Investigator: Dr. K.M. Tsang Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1995.07 DEVELOPMENT OF A RADIOSITY ENGINE To develop a software packet on contemporary graphics machines which provides user friendly interface for scene description, automatically divides large surfaces into small patches, and performs the radiosity computation. Investigator: Dr. W.W. Tsang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1993.09 SAD_FACT: A STRUCTURED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN FRAMEWORK USING ALGEBRAIC SEMANTICS AND CATEGORY THEORY To formulate a unified theoretical framework for the structured analysis and design models using initial algebra semantics and category theory. Investigator: Dr. T.H. Tse Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants The Hong Kong and China Gas Co. Ltd. Research Fund Starting date: 1986.07 FUNCTIONAL OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN (FOOD) To propose a functional object-oriented design (FOOD) methodology, enabling software engineers to visualize in a graphical fashion the object-oriented properties of target systems; to define the behavioural properties using a graphical form of equatio axioms. Investigators: Dr. T.H. Tse (Principal) Professor J.A. Goguen Departments: Computer Science University of Oxford, U.K. Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1990.01 NOODLE: A 3-DIMENSIONAL NET-BASED OBJECT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT To formulate a theoretical framework for object-oriented analysis and design methodologies using predicate-transition nets. Investigator: Dr. T.H. Tse Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1992.10 COD: A COMMUNICATING OBJECTS DESIGN MODEL To formulate a theoretical framework for object-oriented analysis and design methodologies using the process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Investigators: Dr. T.H. Tse (Principal) Dr. J. Jacob Dr. F.C.M. Lau Mr. K.R.P.H. Leung Departments: Computer Science Computer Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University The University of York, U.K. Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1994.07 IN BLACK AND WHITE: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAM TESTING To formulate an integrated testing methodology for object-oriented software. Investigators: Dr. T.H. Tse (Principal) Mr. F.T. Chan Professor H.Y. Chen Dr. T.Y. Chen Departments: Computer Science Jinan University, People's Republic of China School of Professional and Continuing Education University of Melbourne, Australia Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.11 INTEGRATING THE STRUCTURED SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT MODELS: A FORMAL APPROACH To formulate a unified theoretical framework for the structured systems development models. This project is one of the series of projects of the software engineering group, to bridge the gap between popular graphical methods and formal methods in software engineering. Investigator: Dr. T.H. Tse Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 STUDY OF GENERALIZED NUMERICAL RANGES AND GENERALIZED NUMERICAL RADII To study and to obtain new results on generalized numerical ranges and generalized numerical radii of matrices and linear operators. Investigator: Dr. N.K. Tsing Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.11 DEVELOPING USER MODEL-BASED INTELLIGENT AGENTS To develop user model-based intelligent agents that can provide guidance and assistance in fast-paced and information-rich computer tasks. Investigators: Dr. J.K. Rosenblatt Dr. J.K. Rosenblatt Departments: Psychology Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 AN INDEX FOR THE XIAN FO TONG YUAN BY ZHAO YOUQIN To prepare index of the Xian Fo Tong Yuan ([A Discourse] on the Common Origins of [the Teacings of] Immortals and Buddhas) [Zhao 1990], a treatise on inner alchemy written by Zhao Youqin (1271-?), a famous Chinese alchemist, astronomer and mathematician, one of the patriarchs of the Quan zhan school. Investigator: Dr. A.K. Volkov Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1997.07 RUN-TIME SUPPORT FOR IRREGULAR APPLICATIONS ON CLUSTER OF WORKSTATIONS To develop a portable library to support irregularly structured computation in scientific applications on cluster of workstations. Investigator: Dr. C.L. Wang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1995.11 HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING FOR IRREGULARLY STRUCTURED PROBLEMS ON DISTRIBUTED-MEMORY MACHINES To develop algorithmic techniques and portable implementations on distributed-memory machines for a broad collection of problems with unstructured computations. Investigator: Dr. C.L. Wang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1996.09 MODELING NURBS SWEEP SURFACES To model optimal sweep surfaces representable in the NURBS form. Investigator: Dr. W.P. Wang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.09 COMPUTING INTERSECTION CURVES OF QUADRIC SURFACES To investigate efficient algorithms for computing the intersection curves of quadric surfaces, which have wide application in geometric modeling. New algorithms will be implemented and compared with existing techniques. Investigator: Dr. W.P. Wang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 COLLISION DETECTION IN LARGE-SCALE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS To devise and implement a practical and efficient collision detection algorithms in a large-scale virtual environment. Investigator: Dr. W.P. Wang Department: Computer Science Source of funding: RGC Fundable Projects (Block Grant Funded) Starting date: 1996.10 METAMORPHOSIS OF 3D SURFACE MODELS To devise efficient algorithms of interpolating the shapes of 3D objects. Investigator: Dr. W.P. Wang Department: Computer Science Starting date: 1997.07 THE JACOBIAN CONJECTURE The 50-year-old conjecture states that a polynomial mapping between complex n-dimensional spaces whose Jacobian is non-zero constant has an inverse which is also given by a polynomial mapping. In general dimension, the conjecture is known to be true when the mapping is quadratic. In two-dimension, the conjecture has been verified when the polynomials of the given mapping have degree less than or equal to 100. There are partial answers when the degrees of the polynomials satisfy some further conditions, e.g. when one of the degrees has at most two prime factors. Some results can be obtained by elementary method, e.g. the theorem of Nakai and Baba, which includes the case when one of the degrees is 4. One of the aims in the project is to investigate the use of Newton polygons in obtaining these special cases. The possibility of using complex analytic methods is also considered. Investigator: Dr. P.P.W. Wong Department: Mathematics Starting date: 1987.09 MULTIMEDIA-BASED LEARNING SYSTEM FOR DATABASE MODELING AND DESIGN Multimedia-based learning system for database modeling and design Investigator: Dr. L.W.M. Yee Department: Computer Science Source of funding: University Grants Committee Central Allocation Starting date: 1995.05 Completion date: 1997.05 VISUALIZATION USER-INTERFACE FOR ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Research and development of a visual/virtual-reality interface for enterprise information management. Investigator: Dr. L.W.M. Yee Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 INTELLIGENT AGENT FOR THE FINANCIAL DATABASES To develop an intelligent agent (system) to help financial managers/executives overcome information overflow problems. Investigators: Dr. J.C.H. Yen (Principal) Dr. T.X. Bui Dr. H. Chen Dr. K.Y. Tam Departments: Computer Science Information and System Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Management Information System, University of Arizona, U.S.A. Source of funding: Hong Kong Research Grants Council Starting date: 1995.07 FINANCIAL DIGITAL LIBRARY AND INTELLIGENT AGENTS To create an internet-based financial digital library to dramatically improve the searching and retrieval of financial information, such as, annual reports, stock prices, foreign currency exchange rates, and so on, over the internet. Investigator: Dr. J.C.H. Yen Department: Computer Science Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.11 A RESEARCH PROPOSAL FOR DECODING To find a shortest-length algorithm of SLSR for multiple sequences with different lengths; to determine the equivalence of different SLSR algorithms; to construct the idea VALPOL (n) when n>2; to feasibly calculate the generator for combined LFSR multi-sequences. Investigator: Dr. J. Yu Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1994.11 A MATRIX PROBLEM To solve a specific matrix problem and use the result to attack the problem of tame-ness of quadratic polynomial automorphisms. Investigator: Dr. J. Yu Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 A NEW APPROACH TO NAGATA'S CONJECTURE VIA GROEBNER BASES To solve famous Nagata's Conjecture in the field of algebraic geometry which says that there exist non-tameautomorphisms for commutative polynomial algebras of in three or high dimension. Investigator: Dr. J. Yu Department: Mathematics Source of funding: RGC Fundable Projects (Block Grant Funded) Starting date: 1996.10 STUDY OF DELAYED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS WITH APPLICATIONS ON POPULATION CONTROL PROBLEMS AND NEURAL NETWORKS To analyse system and control theory of population problems and neural network problems via the study of delayed differential equations. Investigator: Dr. S.P. Yung Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1995.07 AN ELEMENTERY APPROACH TO WAVELETS WITH APPLICATIONS TO IMAGE PROCESSING To develop an effective and engineering-friendly approach for discrete wavelets to enhance both the theory and the applications of image processing. Investigator: Dr. S.P. Yung Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.07 OPTIMAL CONTROL OF SOME BIOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL PROCESSES: A VISCOSITY SOLUTION APPROACH To generalize the viscosity solution theory to more general optimal control problems; to solve some important biological problems via the viscosity solution method; to solve some important physical problems via the viscosity solution method. Investigators: Dr. S.P. Yung (Principal) Dr. L.K. Li Dr. S.K. Ng Departments: Mathematics Applied Mathematics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Mathematics, Hong Kong Baptist University Source of funding: RGC Fundable Projects (Block Grant Funded) Starting date: 1996.10 APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS FOR COMBINATORIAL PROBLEMS To investigate both the positive and the negative aspects of some combinatorial problems; to explore the hardness of approximations; to design some polynomial time algorithms with good performance guarantees. Investigator: Dr. W. Zang Department: Mathematics Source of funding: Committee on Research and Conference Grants Starting date: 1996.11