HKUST Annual Report 2018-19

26 ANNUAL REPORT 2018-19 Lab to Market RENEWABLE ENERGY DEVICES FOR MOBILE EDGE COMPUTING Mobile-edge computing is a crucial technology for 5G networks, offering low-latency computation services at the edge of wireless networks and being a major enabler for the internet of things and smart city technologies, among other applications. Published research on mobile-edge computing with renewable energy-powered devices, by Prof. Khaled B. LETAIEF, Prof. ZHANG Jun, and alumnus MAO Yuyi (all Electronic and Computer Engineering), was ranked one of the top 10 most popular articles in the premier IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications over 28 consecutive months. The 2016 paper was titled “Dynamic Computation Offloading for Mobile-Edge Computing with Energy Harvesting Devices”. It was also recognized as an Essential Science Indicators highly cited paper and received the prestigious 2019 IEEE Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. BARCODES WITH IMAGES Prof.MOWWai-Ho(ElectronicandComputerEngineering) and his research team have developed a generation of barcodes employing images instead of conventional black-and-white lines and blocks. The innovation involves the development of picture-embedded proprietary codes (PiCodes) and video-embedded codes (ViCodes), which can attract more attention through their aesthetic appearance. The codes are also more secure as they are harder to change, making it difficult to plant malware or links to unsafe webpages. The barcodes will allow people to obtain complex information, such as product brochures, without internet connections and could transform retail shopping for consumers. PREDICTING RESPONSE TO SUBSTITUTE PRODUCTS Given greater product variety and shorter product life cycle, it is becoming more difficult to predict what consumers will buy when faced with substitute products. Prof. Guillermo GALLEGO (Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics) is leading a Research Grants Council- funded project into “Multi-product inventory and dynamic pricing decisions with dynamic substitution effects” to examine how e-retailers should decide on the depth and breadth of their assortments and pricing strategy. Research Highlights