A*STAR Awards S$12.2m In Grants To 17 Projects To Advance Research Capabilities In Media & Entertainment, Medical Technologies, Education And Water
A*STAR’s Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) awarded S$12.2m to fund 17 research projects in the areas of media & entertainment, medical technologies, education, water, infocomm, chemicals, energy and electronics.
The grants were awarded to Singapore’s public sector institutions such as the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to enable them to pursue long-term scientific goals and technological innovation.
Said Professor Chong Tow Chong, Executive Director of SERC, “Excellent science and research talent are critical to achieving impactful technological outcomes. These grants from A*STAR will foster high quality R&D and innovation among researchers in Singapore and drive the development and advancement of knowledge-intensive industries.”
He added, “This year saw a record high number of 115 grant applicants. The 17 teams that ultimately secured the research grants are indeed the crème de la crème and they have the potential to break new grounds and deliver impactful outcomes which can enhance the way we live and the way we learn in the near future.”
Media & Entertainment
One of the research projects aims to develop a method which would enable users to locate and decipher textual information in videos with ease. This is expected to set the benchmark for future video text recognition research. Essentially, the project will research into video text recognition to enhance identification of textual content in videos, thus making a search through the entire database for a favourite family video or a particular surveillance video an easy and speedy task.
Said principal investigator of the project, Prof Tan Chew Lim from the School of Computing at NUS, “Video has become one of the most popular media types delivered through the internet, broadcast and wireless networks. Most studies done in the area of media research have focused on the detection of text in videos instead of the recognition of text. The ability to find and read the lines of text in a video will allow for the independent analysis and extraction of relevant content which can yield a myriad of applications.”
This project is a collaboration between Prof Tan and Dr Lu Shijian from A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research, both of whom have previously won top prize at the ICDAR 2009[1] Document Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO) for their work in image analysis and recognition.
Medical Technologies
Another project is the development of a vision-aided, intelligent tremor-compensating microsurgical instrument aimed to reduce the inherent physiological tremors in the human hand, and hence minimise any margin of error. This will potentially enable surgeons to perform complex clinical tasks of microsurgical manipulation and suturing of vessels in reconstructive microsurgery more accurately. The project led by Assistant Prof Ang Wei Tech of NTU’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering will give the “sense of sight” to the instrument to provide visual guidance to surgeons during surgery. This will give an additional advantage to the instrument that can feel its own motion and distinguish between the tremulous movement and the intended motion of the hand in real-time.
Said Asst. Prof Ang, “The human hand has intrinsic limitations in manual positioning accuracy due to small involuntary movements that may be exacerbated by several factors such as age, amount of quality sleep, and duration of surgery. Our work will give surgeons the necessary element of control, a factor that is of paramount importance in microsurgery where precision is a key part of success.”
Education
The next project, aimed at advancing technology in digital media, will enable an audienceto view distant planets and galaxies on a screen in 3D. This effort, undertaken in collaboration with the Singapore Science Centre, can potentially place Singapore as a key player in planetarium research in the world. The research team led by Assistant Prof Fu Chi Wing from NTU’s School of Computer Engineering will develop an integrated visualisation infrastructure for an all-scale digital planetarium system with a multi-touch navigation control interface to facilitate exploration of the astrophysical universe. Said Asst. Prof Fu, “Astronomical data spans a large order of spatial scales from earth scales of 105 metres to intergalactic scales of 1023 metres. Conventional computer graphics hardware has not been designed to handle such scales, which is why traditional starball projectors have only the capacity to display up to 30,000 stars. Our team believes that this technology will help to scale-down the expanse of the astrophysical universe to a more manageable size, bringing us a step closer to understanding planetary systems.” The technology may also be applied in reverse – to magnify smaller scale systems, such as in biological imaging to obtain a clearer view of the biological environment.
Water
One other project aims to provide communities in rural areas with a cheaper and better means of obtaining water that is free from contaminants and toxic substances. Led by grant recipient Associate Prof. J. Paul Chen from NUS’s Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, the project team will develop metal oxide-based affinity membranes to remove harmful substances such as arsenic from water. This novel membrane makes use of adsorption and filtration technology, which is a more practical and energy-efficient approach than current methods of reverse osmosis, adsorption, and ion exchange, to effectively remove arsenic and other contaminants such as bacteria from water.
Said Assoc. Prof Chen, “The presence of arsenic is common in ground water and is especially harmful in the South-east Asian regions where a large number of people drink from and consume food crops irrigated by tube well water. Ingestion of arsenic results in a wide range of health problems, some of which include painful skin lesions, liver failure, kidney and lung diseases, cardio-vascular diseases and in extreme cases, multiple cancers. The affinity membrane that we will develop will offer an affordable and robust means to hunt down, capture and rid harmful substances in water to prevent this.”
The SERC Public Sector Funding (PSF) programme seeks to cultivate research capabilities of Singapore’s public sector institutions by seeding and supporting high quality investigator-led research activity across a wide range of disciplines. Since the start of the PSF programme in 2001, a total of 184 research projects were given grants. More than half of them are now completed. The findings of these completed projects have been published in more than 1330 research journals and a total of 90 primary patents have also been filed. The call for applications for the next round of PSF programme grants will be announced in October 2009.
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AGENCY FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND RESEARCH
About the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC)
The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) is the lead agency for fostering world-class scientific research and talent for a vibrant knowledge-based Singapore. A*STAR actively nurtures public sector research and development in Biomedical Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Engineering, and supports Singapore’s key economic clusters by providing intellectual, human and industrial capital to our partners in industry and the healthcare sector. It oversees 23 research institutes, consortia and centres located in Biopolis and Fusionopolis, and the area in their vicinity, and supports extramural research in the universities, hospitals, research centres, and with other local and international partners.
The Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) promotes public sector research and development in science and engineering with seven full-fledged, advanced research institutes that develop high-tech research in a wide range of fields including communications, data storage, materials, chemicals, advanced computing, microelectronics and process manufacturing.
For more information about A*STAR, please visit www.a-star.edu.sg
ANNEX
Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC)’s Public Sector Funding (PSF) Programme – 2009 Grant Call
Grants highlighted in the press release are highlighted in blue
Abbreviations:
DNA – Deoxyribonucleic Acid
LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas
MEMS – Microelectromechanical Systems
NTU – Nanyang Technological University
NUS – National University of Singapore
The PSF grant call is open to all researchers from publicly funded local universities, polytechnics, non-defence related public sector agencies and other organs of state, and is held annually to support researchers and scientists in work related to the areas of science and engineering. 17 out of an unprecedented total of 115 proposals submitted were selected for award in the PSF 2009 grant call.
Topics: A*Star, economic growth, Economy, education, entertainment, Governance, grants, media, medical technologies, Public Sector, research, science, Singapore, water
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