The Department attracts research postgraduate students from Hong Kong and around the world, setting the scene for a rich mix of intellectual stimulation and cross-cultural engagement in various areas of computing and information technology. Over 100 research students are currently studying towards either MPhil or PhD degrees, under the supervision of our faculty members who are well-experienced with research capabilities that cover a comprehensive spectrum of important areas. There are different multidisciplinary Research Groups in which our faculty members and research personnel are concentrating on producing impactful output.
The Department has been committed to providing an excellent research environment for PhD students:
Main research areas for PhD study
Our researchers of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Computing bring together the efforts from diverse areas to deliver high impact research. Among others, their investigations cover parallel databases as services; data accountability and service outsourcing; data and communicative behaviour in online social networks; effective search engine indexing; transfer-learning methods for multisource data sets; and social media big data analysis. Our group also works on various kinds of machine learning models, such as deep learning and transfer learning models, while applying these in the design of robots. We also work on social robotics, affective computing, and artificial creativity as well.
Cyber Security and Privacy address a wide range of security and privacy issues that have a profound impact on securing the cyberspace. Researchers in the group have expertise in areas such as the financial technology, blockchain, post-quantum computing security, mobile applications, Internet of Things (IoT), and the underlying Internet infrastructure. They have a close relationship with industries and have successfully transferred our knowledge to solve security and privacy problems in the real world.
Multimedia combines content such as sound, images and graphics to make applications dynamic in areas such as education, entertainment, social networking and telemedicine. The key research challenges lie in managing complex multimedia objects and extending them into three dimensions with the capacity for real-time interaction. Our researchers focus on three-dimensional computer graphic modelling and rendering, distributed three-dimensional graphics, image and video quality enhancement, content-based image retrieval, and multi-sensor data and motion analysis.
Networking and Mobile Computing is concerned with designing efficient communications protocols and architectures for exchanging data among computers and mobile devices, enabling a wide range of networked applications with enhanced real-world experience of network and mobile users. Research areas investigated by the group faculty include but are not limited to edge computing, smart sensing and networking, pervasive and mobile computing, Internet of Things, and network measurement.
Pattern recognition, or the classification of measurements and observations, is significantly enhanced through the application of computational intelligence techniques. With surging demand for efficient and high-performance automated pattern recognition, breakthroughs are being made in emerging areas such as video and image processing, medical imaging, biometric security, Web intelligence, social media mining, and human-machine interaction with language, among others, with applications to smart city development and health care.
Systems and software engineering involves the development of methodologies, processes and tools for building robust, high performance computer-based systems. In this area, our researchers have applied their expertise on key challenges in agile development, context-aware middleware, cost estimation, cyber-physical systems, real-time embedded systems, software metrics, software processes and quality, storage in embedded systems and risk management. They are also working on solutions to the problems arising from the use of business-critical applications.
Established by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong in 2009, the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) aims at attracting the best and brightest students in the world to pursue their PhD studies in Hong Kong's universities. The Fellowship provides an annual stipend of HK$319,200 and a yearly conference and research-related travel allowance of HK$13,300 for each successful awardee for a period up to three years.
In addition to HKPFS award, PolyU and the Department provide the following to the awardees:
The Department has been committed to providing an excellent remuneration package for PhD students:
Please click here to download the promotional leaflet for more details about the Scheme.
Check out the website of Study@PolyU, or
Contact Ms Jolie Chick, Departmental Research Committee Secretary
Telephone: (852) 2766 7303
Facsimile: (852) 2774 0842
Email: comp.phd@polyu.edu.hk
For online application, please refer to Study@PolyU.