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Two academic staff from Faculty of Engineering were elected IEEE Fellows 2019. Professor Yizhou Yu of Department of Computer Science was awarded for his contributions to geometric and image-based modeling, while Dr Lijun Jiang of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering was awarded for his contributions to broadband computational electromagnetic methods.

Professor Yu is an outstanding researcher in computer vision and computer graphics, whose work has significant impact in both the research community and the film visual effects industry. He has co-authored more than 120 research papers, among which over 60 papers are in very top publication channels, including 28 papers in ACM SIGGRAPH/TOG and 27 papers in IEEE Transactions and top IEEE conferences, such as IEEE TPAMI and IEEE CVPR. Innovative technologies co-invented by him, such as image-based modeling and geometry-guided fluid simulation, have been widely adopted by the film visual effects industry.

More specifically, Professor Yu has made significant contributions to subareas of computer vision and graphics, including image-based modeling and gradient domain geometric modeling. He was the first person to develop methods for image-based appearance modeling using a sparse set of photographs for an entire real scene at once for the purpose of producing photorealistic renderings of the scene under novel lighting conditions. Three of his appearance modeling papers in 1998 and 1999 have been cited over 1400 times in total in the past 20 years and are recognised as seminal articles in this area. Methods from these papers have been used in multiple feature films, including “The Matrix”, “Mission: Impossible 2”, and “Deep Blue Sea”.

Professor Yu was also among the first group of researchers to work on gradient domain geometric modeling. The 2004 SIGGRAPH paper he co-authored has been cited over 600 times in the past 14 years. This paper proposes a new object modeling and editing technique based on gradient field manipulation. This work helped to set off a strong wave of research activities on gradient domain object modeling and editing in the research community.

Dr. Jiang has made distinctive contributions in large-scale heterogeneous electromagnetic modeling, EMC/EMI for VLSI and packaging, and multiphysics characterisation methodologies. He is the frontier scholar in broadband fast multipole algorithms and low frequency integral equations. He is a leading researcher in solving practical heterogeneity with linear/nonlinear, explicit/measured, and deterministic/stochastic properties in electromagnetic analysis. His team made state of the art contributions in the discontinuous Galerkin time domain methods, broadband integral equation methods, PEEC developments, OAM in microwave, and nonlinear electromagnetics. His innovative research achievements have been broadly adopted or referenced by both industries and academic institutions. His research achievements have profound impacts to IEEE EMC, AP and MTT societies. He has been collaborating with international scholars and experts over various research topics.

His HKU Electromagnetics and Optics Research Laboratory team has received over 20 regional and international awards, including Best Conference Paper Awards, Best Student Paper Awards, Best Poster Award, Young Scientist Awards, Technical Achievement Award, etc. Most of his PhD students graduated with external award(s).

Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of Engineering, is delighted to see his faculty members being recognised by professional bodies, “I would like to congratulate Professor Yu and Dr Jiang for their IEEE Fellowships which is the “The Oscars” in the Engineering arena. Being elevated as IEEE Fellow is an encouragement as well as a recognition towards the research achievements of our academic staff. We expect their outstanding research achievements can benefit the humankind and the community.”

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. The total number of Fellows elevated in any one year must not exceed 0.1% of the IEEE voting membership. Currently, IEEE comprised over 400,000 members in 160 countries.

Media enquiries:
Ms Celia Lee, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 8519; Email: leecelia@hku.hk) or
Miss Bonnie Tsang, Faculty of Engineering, HKU (Tel: 3917 1924; Email: bonniepy@hku.hk)