MSc & PhD IN INFORMATION & COMM. TECHNOLOGY

Explore the future of information and communication technologies in the following areas of specialization:

Advanced Database This is a multidisciplinary research that involves Mobile, Grid and Spatial Technologies. This research area is concern with enabling an optimised business operation that can run applications built with a comprehensive set of tools and based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework. This technology will be useful for various applications such as real-time monitoring, data mining, mobile or wireless, sattelite, Geographical Information System (GIS) and Business industrial application. Knowledge Management This research area is concerned with capturing or acquiring tacit knowledge of expert(s) and codifying the knowledge against its reliability and validity. The capturing knowledge emphasizes on the knowledge acquisition techniques to convert expert’s knowledge, know-how, into rules that a computer can use. Knowledge codification is organizing and representing knowledge before disseminate it to authorized personnel. One conclusion is that certain knowledge is more of an art than a science, which art is difficult to codify into rules and formulation. The challenge is to make knowledge explicit, useful, and meaningful. E-Business This research area is concerned with investigating the various technologies used in e-business domain. The social and technical issues are explored with a view to improve the commercial benefits in terms of business efficiency and effectiveness. The technologies explored include the use of intelligent systems as well as data acquisition system to execute business knowledge on industrial applications such as in the oil and gas, service, agriculture and manufacturing industries. This research area emphasize on both research rigor and relevance, which will benefit those practitioners and researchers in the commercial and in the academia. Software Engineering The research area encompasses on improvements in the quality of software and on reduction in the cost of software development. It has implications on how to analyze, design, build, test, and maintain safe and reliable software systems. The research area also will cover broad research which includes research into embedded and real-time systems, communications, databases, software design techniques, user interfaces and human-computer interaction, distributed systems engineering, software measurement and quality, software testing, software processes, requirements engineering, software tools, formal methods in software engineering, and the theoretical underpinnings of software engineering. This research ranges from fundamental research advancing our understanding of the discipline, to applied research advancing the practice of software engineering in a number of domains, to technology transfer with local industry. Multimedia Systems This research area explores both the technical and human factor aspect of multimedia technology. On the technical side, we explore fundamental algorithms in real-time computer graphics, volumetric data processing, image processing, audio processing, and stereoscopic rendering techniques. We explore as well the integration of these techniques with virtual reality technologies, and this integration includes the research, design and implementation of programmer-friendly application interface for various advanced virtual reality hardware devices. On the human factor aspect, we explore the various issues including the impact of multimedia and virtual reality technologies on productivity and learning, the optimal design of a multimedia system for a specific problem domain, and novel interaction mechanism for effective human-computer interaction. This discipline of research has important contribution to areas such as computer games, multimedia learning system, telemedicine and geophysical exploration. The current project is to develop a petroleum data visualization software program that displays objects stereoscopically. The research will seek to optimize the sense of object presence given the current state of stereoscopic technology, and incorporate this optimization into data visualization tool that will be develop in-house. Data Communication & Networking The research group covers a broad range of topics in data communication and networking, including network protocols and architecture, modeling and analysis, network management and security. We have particular interests in the domain of applications such as mobile computing, network management, network security, pervasive systems and high performance computing. Our current projects include cluster computing, voice over ip (VOIP), intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS), remote monitoring, pervasive system and quality of service (QoS). The research is geared towards improving the quality of life through the application of technology that will help support both high performance and pervasive communications systems. The current project is to develop a wireless application that integrates failure alerting via Short Message Service (SMS) mode into the manual failures detection method in gas pipelines. This research will benefit oil and gas companies in Malaysia. It proposed the use of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) to send signals in SMS format from remote failure detection sites to a cetral station in the event of failure. This work takes advantage of the GSM network to monitor the oil and gas company’s remote stations through out Malaysia. The outcome of the project is a fully integrated and centralized failure alerting system. The aim of the system is to automate the manual process of failure detection and reporting from remote sites to a central stations. Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence is a study of information technology, human intelligence and life science. Students will learn about some of the most recent and exciting developments in Computer Science. Students gain insight into the basic principles of artificial intelligence and come to understand typical industrial and other applications and their associated practical techniques. The programme involves the study of information acquisition, learning and intelligence methodologies. The main areas examined include developments in advanced control and information technology. Other compulsory topics include software, evolutionary computation and neural networks. Optional subjects allow consideration of additional specialist interests such as information theory and coding, fuzzy systems, adaptive signal processing, etc. AI group research is currently focused on data and text mining. One of the proposed research projects is to develop an English text summization software tool which can be used to extract important sentences or information from English text documents.