Imagination to Reality Powers Up

Dare-to-Dream
Research Collaborations
Limsoon Wong
Institute for Infocomm Research
Make Computers Easier to Use

Search photo by
visual keywords
The Collaboration
• Formal joint laboratory (IPAL)
• Collaborators:
– CNRS: Talent, $, students
– NUS SOC: Talent, $, students
– I2R: Talent, students
• Results: Jointly owned novel image processing methods
and applications.
Hide Existence of Files
• Defeat even attacker who: Doesn’t even want him
– is familiar with system to know the file exists!
– has full access to sytem
– lacks only the file access key
• Applications:
– External data/storage &
managed services
– Military & financial, where
data is so valuable that
coercion is likely

StegFS:
Steganographic File System
The Collaboration
• Joint project
• Collaborators
– NUS SOC (Talent, student)
– I2R (Talent)
• Results: Jointly owned IPs on StegFS

Hwee Hwa Kian Lee Xuan Zhou

I2R SOC SOC
Benefit Children
• Childhood leukaemia is a
heterogeneous disease
• Treatment is based on
subtype
• 3 different tests and 4 different
experts are needed for
diagnosis
 Curable in USA,
 fatal in Indonesia

A single platform diagnosis

based on gene expression
The Collaboration
• Joint project
• Collaborators:
– St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (data, diagnosis, $)
– I2R (gene expression analysis)
• Results:
– Clinical outcomes: owned by St. Jude
– Algorithmic outcomes: owned by I2R

Jim Jinyan Allen Limsoon

One Step Closer to
Omnipresence
• Wanted: A system of
networked wireless
sensors carried on
autonomous mobile
nodes that are able to
operate in all kinds of
terrain

• Challenge: To integrate
– localization systems The All Terrain Advanced
– mobile ad hoc networking Network of Ubiquitous Mobile
– distributed robotics. Asynchronous Systems
The Collaboration
• Informal ad hoc collaboration
• Collaborators:
– UC Davis (localization, mobile ad hoc networking)
– CMU, U. of Tokyo, NUS (distributed robotics)
– I2R (mobile ad hoc networking)
• Results:
– Joint papers only
– No IPs expected
Better Phone Service for
Remote Arctic Villages
• Ad hoc networking for the
Village Radio system in
Canadian arctic
• Energy-efficient routing
protocol to improve the
Village Radio system
• Multi-path for robustness
• Protocol learns routes
from packets transmitted
• QoS beyond best effort
through multi-path routing
Bears pictures: Copyright 2002 Thomas D. Mangelsen, Inc.
The Collaboration
= +

• Stimulate scientific & • R&D Consortium

tech. collab. between • Collaborators
S’pore, Alberta, & the rest
– TRLabs (talent, $)
of Canada by:
– I2R (talent, $)
– build research capabilities
• Results
– train graduates in ICT
– owned by TechnoBridge,
– develop new tech which is itself owned by
– promote collaboration A*STAR and TRLabs
among industry partners
of two countries
Protect Authenticity of
Data in a Robust Way

Altere Who
d? signed?

Promote robustness of crypto techniques (e.g., digital signature)

from fragile level to non-fragile level, in order to meet needs of
media storage and transmission over lossy channels.
The Collaboration
• Joint project • Results:
• Collaborators: – Media authentication:
jointly owned
– Columbia University
(talent, students) – Object authentication:
owned by I2R
– I2R (talent, students)

Sun Qibin Chang SF Tian Qi

Let Machines Perceive as We Do
Higher PSNR!
• Perceptual visual quality according
to characteristics of human vision

New perceptual metric perceives correctly.

Comparison with MOS (Mean

Opinion Score)

• Outperform metrics in ITU-T Pearson

Correlation
Spearman
Correlation
VQEG test PSNR metric 0.66 0.69
• Adoption in video coding results in New metric 0.83 0.81

efficiency & quality improvement Better accuracy Better consistency

(other systems make compromise
betw. the two)
The Collaboration
• Joint Project
• Collaborators: NTT DoCoMo R&D Center
– NTT DoCoMo (data
generation, subjective tests, $)
– I2R (new methodology)
• Results:
– Visual quality evaluation for
mobilecom: jointly owned
– Quality gauge from partial
data: owned by I2R
– s/w embedded in DoCoMo’s
coding system: owned by
DoCoMo
Collaboration Models

• Partners put in tech, people, and/or $

• I2R puts in tech and/or peope
• Each retain their background IP
• Foreground IP can be jointly own or split by
agreement
Thank You