Conferences & Conferences & SymposiaSymposia

ZnO Diskby Assoc Prof Sun Xiaowei, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

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NTU to Raise Earthquake Awareness among Young Singaporeans Recent devastating earthquakes in Pakistan on 8 October 2005 and Sumatra-Andaman Islands in December 2004 brought into focus the importance of building structures that can withstand earthquakes. NTU’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) is organising Singapore’s first ever earthquake-themed competition for tertiary students, the NTU Earthquake Challenge 2006, to provide students an opportunity to develop insight into the important factors that can influence the dynamic behaviour and performance of a building structure during an earthquake. The competition will impress upon engineering students the considerations involved in structural design by getting them to construct models which will then be put through a simulated earthquake using a Shake Table at CEE’s Protective Engineering Laboratory – the largest area of strong floor among laboratories involved in earthquake simulation research outside Japan. With such knowledge, students will gain an appreciation of structural considerations of buildings, factors that affect the stability of buildings and the different modes of structural failure.

Participants in seminar and speakers from MAE and IHPC

MAE/IHPC Joint Seminar on Computational Engineering: From Theory to ModellingA science & engineering seminar entitled “Computational Engineering: From Theory to Modelling” was held in NTU on 26 May 2006. It was jointly organized by the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) with the aim to foster better co-operation between MAE and IHPC and generate more opportunities for research collaborations. The seminar attracted more than 100 participants comprising of research students and staff.

Through this seminar, MAE and IHPC have moved one step closer to promote greater synergy and developing a stronger tie.

6th International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid Assoc Prof Stephen John Turner and his team from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) were the organizers of the successful 6th International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid) 2006 meeting in Singapore. The past years have seen tremendous challenges with the convergence of Web Services and Grid Technology. Grid Technology enables a major change in the paradigm for conducting work which includes collaborative sharing. With this in mind CCGrid 2006 provided researchers and practitioners with an excellent opportunity to share their research and experience at the cross-roads of Grid Technology. The event was held together with Grid Asia by the National Grid Office.

On the first day of the CCGrid, Assoc Prof Seah Hock Soon, Chair of SCE, and Mr Wong Chee Kien Gabriyel from SCE organised the Digital Media Virtual Grid Community (VGC) Symposium 2006. On the second day, Asst Prof Shen

Haifeng held a Seminar on Manufacturing VGC Symposium 2006 entitled ‘Leveraging Single-user Applications for Multi-user Collaboration in Grid-based Virtual Community’.

CCGrid brought together many great minds in Grid technology

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22nd Asia Pacific Advance Network Assoc Prof Lee Bu Sung, Associate Chair (Research) from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) and his team co-organised the 22nd Asia Pacific Advance Network (APAN) meeting together with the National University of Singapore. The conference was held from 17-21 July 2006, with over 300 participants from around the region. This 5-day event included tutorials, oral presentations, and demonstrations covering advanced network technologies and

Assoc Prof Lee sharing his experience at APAN

APAN delegates

advanced networking environment for the research and education community in the Asia-Pacific region, and promotes global collaboration.

applications. APAN is designed to be a high-performance network for research and development on advanced next generation applications and services. APAN provides an

10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data MiningThe 10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2006) was successfully organized by Assoc Prof Lim Ee Peng, Assoc Prof Ng Wee Keong, and other faculty staff from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE). PAKDD is a leading international conference in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all Knowledge Discovery and Data mining (KDD) related areas including data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific

discovery, data visualisation, causal induction and knowledge-based systems.

As part of the PAKDD conference, Assoc Prof Tan Ah Hwee, the Workshop Chair, organised a series of PAKDD pre-conference workshops, including Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics (WISI 2006), Workshop on Data Mining for Biomedical Applications (BioDM 2006), Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Life Science Literatures (KDLL 2006), and Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from XML Documents (KDXD 2006).

Faculty from SCE mingling at the PAKDD conference The PAKDD pre-conference workshop

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Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation Assoc Prof Stephen John Turner from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) was the chair of the Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006), formerly called Parallel and Distributed Simulation. The steering committee for the event continues the expanded scope for PADS 2006. In addition to the traditional focus on parallel and distributed simulation methods and applications, the workshop now included all aspects of simulation technology. The event was sponsored by ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation (SIGSIM), IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Simulation (IEEE-TCSIM), and Society for Modelling and Simulation International (SCS).

4th Cyberworld Conference

Programme Chair, Assoc Prof Sourin (right) and the general co-chair of the conference, Prof TL Kunii at the opening of CW2005

The 2005 Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference The 2005 Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference (ACSAC 2005) was held in October 2005. The event was hosted by the Computing Systems Division of the School of Computer Engineering (SCE). ACSAC 2005, which was held in Singapore, was the tenth in the series of leading forums for sharing emerging research findings in this field.

The committee received a total of 173 submissions. In addition to contributed papers, ACSAC 2005 included two keynote speeches from authorities in academia and industry: Ruby B Lee, from Princeton University, spoke on Processor Architecture for Trustworthy Computers, and Jesse Z Fang, from Intel Corporation shared his views on Challenges and Opportunities on Multi-core Microprocessor.

Assoc Prof Seah Hock Soon, Chair, and Assoc Prof Alexei Sourin from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) organized the fourth conference on Cyberworlds on November 2005. The event was held at the NTU campus. Besides the main conference track, the school organized two special tracks: the international workshops on Language Understanding and Agents for Real World Interaction (LUAR 2005), and Web Computing in Cyberworlds (WCCW 2005). A total of 76 papers were accepted for presentation. Extended versions of selected papers have been printed in the special issues of The Visual Computer and The Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence.

Cognitive Science SymposiumThe Centre for Computational Intelligence (C2i), a research centre in the School of Computer Engineering (SCE) was instrumental in organizing the Science and Engineering Research Centre (SERC) Cognitive Science Symposium, “Building Tomorrow’s Cognitive Systems”, on 26 September 2005. The symposium, a follow-up from the NTU-Cognitive Science Workshop organised by C2i in January 2005, was well received with over 100 people in attendance from NTU, NIE, I2R, NUS, A*STAR, etc. Prof Wlodzislaw Duch gave a plenary lecture and was involved in SERC discussions on the future thematic program in Cognitive Sciences. Feedback had been very positive and a number of potential collaborations are already emerging as a result of the symposium. SERC is also planning to organise a thematic workshop on Cognitive Systems.

Prof Duch (fourth from left) and some participants at the symposium

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International Symposium on Audit Research

From left: Assoc Prof Premila Gowri Shankar, Asst Profs Bernadine Low and Lim Chee Yeow

From left: Prof Tan Hun-Tong of NTU, Dr Zoe-Vonna Palmros of University of Southern California and Hans Verkruijisse of Ernst and Young, Netherlands at a coffee break

Inaugural Cultural Intelligence Conference

Participants in session

The Center of Leadership and Cultural Intelligence of the Nanyang Business School (NBS) hosted its Inaugural Cultural Intelligence Conference in Dallas, Texas on 4 May 2006. This conference gathered 20 leading international experts in international organizational behaviour, cross-cultural psychology and diversity to exchange views on cultural intelligence (CQ) – a construct that is fast gaining popularity with management scholars. Participants came from universities in the US, Israel, Turkey and Hong

NTU’s Centre for Accounting & Auditing Research (CAAR) co-hosted the 11th and 12th annual International Symposium on Auditing Research, in collaboration with the University of Southern California (USA), Universiteit Maastricht, (Netherlands) and the University of New South Wales (Australia). The 11th annual ISAR was held on 30 June - 1 July

2005 in Singapore, and the 12th was held in Sydney on 22-23 June 2006. This symposium is acknowledged as one of the premier conferences on auditing research and each year close to a hundred academics and practitioners attend the symposium.

Kong. Profs Ang Soon (NTU), Linn Van Dyne (Michigan State University) and Ng Kok Yee (NTU) co-chaired the conference. The key note speaker was Emeritus Prof Harry Triandis (University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne), an eminent scholar in cross-cultural psychology.

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36th IEEE International Symposium on Multiple-valued Logic

The invited speaker, Prof Tsutomu Sasao presenting at the Conference

4th Singapore International Chemical Conference

The Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS) of NTU, the Department of Chemistry at

the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Singapore National Institute of Chemistry jointly hosted the Singapore International Chemical Conference 4

(SICC4) on 8-10 December 2005. It is a biennial conference dedicated to promoting advances in chemistry. This conference was fourth in this series of conferences and aims to reflect on the significant scientific developments in molecular synthesis and catalysis, to discuss new ideas and trends in the twenty-first century, and to raise the profile of chemical sciences in Singapore.

The conference was attended by a total of 561 delegates from 38 countries with 210 oral presentations and 198 posters presentations over 3 days.

(Germany) were the invited speakers for the symposium and they addressed key issues in the research activities of the multiple-valued logic community. New technologies based on multiple-valued logic will have a

significant impact on the world today. Therefore this symposium was hoped to be conducive for exchanging and cultivating new theories and ideas for the advancement of multiple-valued logic systems and related fields.

Opening Ceremony of SICC4 by Conference Chair Prof Loh Teck Peng, Head of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, SPMS

198 posters were showcased at SICC4

The 36th IEEE International Symposium on Multiple-valued Logic (ISMVL 2006) was held at NTU’s Nanyang Executive Centre, Singapore on 17-20 May 2006. The annual symposium covers the areas of multiple-valued logic and related fields.

The symposium was co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Tourism Bureau and was preceded by the 15th International Workshop on Ultra-large Scale Integration Circuits. The highlight of the 4-day programme were two keynote addresses and one tutorial address on state-of-the-art multiple-valued logic. Prof Jaakko Astola from Tampere University of Technology (Finland), Prof Tsutomu Sasao from Kyushu Institute of Technology (Iizuka, Japan), and Prof Claudio Moraga from University of Dortmund

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NTU-Warwick University Chemistry Symposium and the 1st Chemistry and Biological Chemistry Graduate Students Symposium 2006The Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry (CBC), School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS), hosted NTU-Warwick University Symposium on 17 August 2006 at the Nanyang Executive Centre, NTU.

16 academic staff from CBC, four prominent professors from the University of Warwick, UK and one invited chemist from the Harvard Medical School, US gathered and presented their academic research work in the fields of synthetic chemistry, physical and theoretical chemistry, biological chemistry, and materials chemistry. Concurrently, the first CBC graduate students poster symposium was also held and about 30 graduate students and research fellows presented their research results. The symposium was attended by more than 90 chemists with 20 oral presentations for NTU-Warwick symposium and 34 posters were showcased for the first CBC graduate students symposium.

The symposium provided an opportunity for graduate students from CBC to learn and exchange their research ideas with professors and researchers from CBC and Warwick University.

NTU President Dr Su Guaning with Prof Lee Soo Ying, Chair of SPMS, Prof Leung Pak Hing, Associate Chair (Academics), Prof Loh Teck Peng, Head of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, staff and graduate students of Division of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry, SPMS as well as delegates from University of Warwick and Harvard Medical School

4th Chinese Internet Research ConferenceThe 4th Chinese Internet Research Conference was held at NTU from 21-22 July 2006. It was the first time that the conference was held in Asia. The organizer was the Singapore Internet Research Centre at NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI). Entitled “China’s Internet and Chinese Cultures”, the conference focused on the ways in which the Internet and other technologies interact with Chinese cultural and social life. It brought together top researchers from around the world, including scholars from Beijing University and Harvard University. Isaac Mao, one of the forerunners in blogging in China and the one who set up the first Chinese blog engine, was one of the keynote speakers. Scholars, analysts, industry leaders, journalists and legal practitioners from around the world gathered to examine the impact of the Internet on Chinese culture. More information on the conference can be found at www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc/chinaintconf.html

ADM Group Exhibitions• Hessels S & Dunne G. Celestial Mechanics in

Naturalis Electronica, Interferenze New Arts Festival, Rome, Italy, August 2006.

• Kelly J in Fourteen Emerging Artists, Prince Street Gallery, New York, US, July 2006.

• Oh Soon-Hwa, “Darling”, in Between Man and Place, curated by Romy Achituv and Jung Yunah, Ssamzi Art Space, Soeul, Korea, December 2005.

• Oh Soon-Hwa, “Blue Toe Nail” and “Seungae”, in Virtual Conversations/ Virtual Cultures, Macy Gallery, Columbia University Teachers College, New York, US, February 2006.

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International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology 2006The ACM SIGCHI International Advances in Computers and Entertainment conference (ACE 2006) took place in Hollywood, USA, from 14-16 June 2006. The conference was organized by the NTU’s Interaction &

Entertainment Research Centre (IERC) with the ACM SIGCHI Singapore Chapter in cooperation with the Association of Computer Machinery ACM SIGCHI and featured more than 30 posters, 60 papers and 10 demonstrations. The

conference also featured an art exhibition of 10 art works curated by Dr Naoko Tosa of Kyoto University.

IERC’s staff helped with the running of both the conference and the art show. In addition, they

presented four research posters and one art work in the art exhibition. The ACE conference served to strengthen NTU and IERC’s profile among researchers in Computers and Entertainment, a growing and lucrative field.