Research on Smart City
The city is now experiencing the pain and pressure that are often associated with the fast pace of growth and sprawling. Smart city initiatives afford Macau a new opportunity to start its next round of highly efficient and sustainable growth toward economic prosperity and social wellbeing. The city is ready to embark on utilizing ICT, big data development plan, and smart city initiatives to improve governance efficiency, public services and quality of life, and to turn Macau into the top tourist destination in the world.
Macau Institute of Smart City was officially established on September 26, 2016, by Macau University of Science and Technology to further solidify the efforts in smart city research and applications, and to provide a coordinated platform to promote Macau as a smart city. Until now, the Institute has made progress in several fronts and has started a number of initiatives in education, collaboration, research, applications, professional activities, and spin-off companies.
Agreements with companies on smart city related projects
At present, the institute has signed cooperation agreements with many companies include Huachuang Tianyuan Industrial Developing Co., Ltd. (GuangDong), Dawning Information Industry Co., Ltd., Tongfang Technovator International Limited (Macau) on smart environmental protection, air grid quality monitoring projects, vehicle exhaust monitoring projects, smart city information construction, urban cloud construction, smart city management system integration research and other directions.
The Institute and YGSOFT Inc. has signed an agreement to establish the “Macau University of Science of Technology and YGSOFT Joint Artificial Intelligence Laboratory” on 22th March 2017 on campus to providing technical solutions and consulting services for software enterprises; turning university research results into applications in software industry; and serving as an educational platform for software industry personnel to be engaged in advanced academic degree study.
In order to promote industry-university cooperation and accelerate the research and applications of smart city in Macao, the Institute deeply cooperated with China Coal Construction Engineering (Macao) Co., Ltd (CNACG) to establish the Joint Research Center for Future City, the unveiling ceremony of the research center was held on Sept. 27, 2018 at MUST.
Grants for funded smart city projects
At present, nearly 10 research projects, including Research and Development of An Application for Image-based Crowd Counting, Smart, Advertising System: Core Technology and Applications, "How does a computer see" a computational and modeling perspective had received funding from the FDCT. The total amount of funding has exceeded 10 million MOP, including more than 6 million MOP from the government and more than 4 million MOP from enterprises.
MSc in Applied Math and Data Science
We're starting a new master's program in September 2019, it is Master in Applied Mathematics and Data Science which is designed to focus on utilizing mathematics and machine learning in smart city applications, data science research, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence. This program is dedicated to cultivating high-level talents for smart city developers who are strong in applied mathematics and data science to satisfy the requirements in the business community, research institutions, and academia. Furthermore, developing the theories and applications of applied mathematics and data science required in cross-disciplinary research is the long-term goal to integrate artificial intelligence and big data analytics with various industries. This program will produce talents in artificial intelligence and big data analytics, and will benefit the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau.
Cloud system and upcoming GPU cluster server
The Institute and Faculty of Information Technology are deploying a new GPU cluster to provide the powerful computing platform for the researches to carry out artificial intelligence and data science related research projects. This GPU cluster is a single data center rack built using NVIDIA DGX™ supercomputer system and can provide more than 40 units of high-performance GPUs for large-scale deep learning computation, and it is funded by The Science and Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR.
Products and services
According to a series of problems in college life, the research team of the Institute developed corresponding products to promote smart campus development.
- Leaper Box and Leaperchecker APP
In order to realize the goal of smart campus, the research team of the Institute developed a check-in system (Classroom Attendance Verification System or CAVeS) to save time for teachers to take attendance or a roll call of a class and to facilitate students to sign in more quickly and efficiently. Through the online MUST CAVeS APP that relies on the face recognition technology and the hardware device called Leaper box, registered students can sign in at designated time for a class. Besides, the data of students' sign in, such as sign in rate and attendance rate, can be collected and provided to the university's educational administration system to allow teachers to analyze the statistics conveniently and rapidly. At present, the system has been tested in practice for two years in MUST.
- Leaperchecker - Outdoor Wisdom Sign-in System
In order to satisfy the check-in and attendance verification needs for teams of people (students, event attendees) during outdoor activities, the research team of the Institute developed a Leaperchecker system. This system uses the bracelet to sign in with one click for situations where a roll call is needed. The system uses Bluetooth to communicate, and does not need to rely on other network environment. At present, the system has been tested for two years of 300 students' summer activities with excellent performance.
- Allin - Cloud printing system
Allin is a cloud intelligent printer terminal based on Internet and mobile payment platform. Aiming at the daily printing needs of college students, teachers and staff, the system establishes a knowledge-sharing platform to connect with the official campus system and provides high-quality printing service platform for users. Users can upload documents through web pages or WeChat, and then go to any Allin terminal to print documents without queuing, thus saving time and effort.
- Smart access control system
In order to realize smart campus, the institute has developed an intelligent entrance access control system with face recognition technology, which is used for door control and for automatic collection of attendance statistics. Currently, the system has been in trial operation at the entrance of the administrative section on the fifth floor of the university library since December 2017. This system is to be extended to the whole university in the near future.
