NUS Technologies on Offer

INTRO manages a portfolio of 140 technologies invented at NUS. These are in the engineering, physical sciences, information technology and life science areas, and are available for companies to license.

These NUS technologies may be viewed at www.nus.edu.sg/intro/ind_techonoffer.shtml

Parties interested in exploring licensing opportunities with NUS are invited to contact INTRO at intquery@nus.edu.sg

In conjunction with the focus of this issue on information technology, we are pleased to highlight a number of IT-related technologies developed at NUS. These are summaries of the actual technology offers. Please refer to www.nus.edu.sg/intro/ind_techonoffer.shtml for more details on each technology:

Complete Mobile Email Management
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Tan,Kok Kiong

The invention has been developed to enable mobile devices to control and monitor the activity of the user’s home or office personal computer. Linking mobile devices with a remote PC enables its immense processing storage speed to be made available to users even when on the move.

Three applications were developed to extend the capability of the current WAP facility. The first one is an application that allows the user to use the using mobile device to control their email service and to send files from remote PCs as email attachments. The second application allows the user to control the Microsoft PowerPoint application on mobile devices. In the near future, this will include EXCEL and WORD. The third application enables the user to screen capture on the PC and send the resultant image to the mobile phone.
More information can be found at: http://www.domus.nus.edu.sg

The applications of this technology are briefly illustrated below:

• Accessing PC email service including sending file attachment. In business, quality of service and response time is critical. With this competitive edge, the company can now serve customers faster and better
  
• Using mobile device to control Microsoft PowerPoint application. Convert PowerPoint to image file and sent the resultant image to the mobile phone via Multimedia Messaging (MMS). This will enable graphical statistics to be demonstrated on the spot
  
• Viewing screen capture image of the PC on mobile device. This allows researchers to monitor time consuming simulations and experiments from home. It is also useful in industries where engineers need to monitor the performance of machinery

Web-Based Discussion Forum with Realtime Audio/Video Capture and Embedded Multimedia Support
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Chee, Yam San

The National University Singapore has developed a multimedia-enhanced, web-based threaded discussion forum to support collaborative learning.

The software offers a seamless multimedia solution for message posting via a Java applet. Multimedia content can be recorded in real-time and/or imported directly into the message construction interface on a web page and. It will show in situ within a multimedia document interface. In this regard, the software overcomes the common requirement for multimedia content to be recorded and/or imported using external helper applications and to be displayed separately from other textual content. Our Java applet also supports the drag-and-support drop user interface technique for inserting multimedia elements within a web page.

In addition, the software incorporates a generic assessment tool that allows teachers and instructors to customise criteria for evaluating student's’ contributions to the discussion forum and to perform online evaluation of student's’ contributions.

The software should be of interest to organizations involved in providing e-learning and distance learning solutions. It should also be of interest to secondary and tertiary education institutions.

A Method For Learning Through Iterative Perceptual Differentiation and Identification
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Chee, Yam San

Learning to perceptually identify objects or instances of a certain type, and to be able to correctly name those objects or instances of that type, is a fundamental skill that has widespread use in learning and training situations. It is also instrumental in the development of more abstract mental categories. For example, a child must first learn to perceptually differentiate between an apple and an orange before the two objects can be appropriately identified and named. Differences in objects can be greater or less great (e.g. apple and car are more different than apple and orange). But at some point, a child must also learn that two instances of the same object (e.g. orange) are to be regarded as “same” rather than “different.” Acquiring this ability to differentiate and identify to the point of “sameness” is fundamental to the formation and learning of categories.

The National University of Singapore has developed a structured, computer-based approach to learning through iterative perceptual differentiation and identification. This invention prescribes a method for narrowing perceptual differentiation and concept differences and relating these abilities to identification skills. By going through this process, a student learns to correctly name, identify, or diagnose a perceptual stimulus that he or she is presented with.

This invention is useful in all domains that involve image-based discriminant learning. This form of learning is prevalent in image-based medical diagnoses (e.g. radiology, ultrasound, MRI), children’s education, the learning of taxonomies, and all forms of concretized concept learning. The use of the approach prescribed here will facilitate and make efficient learning of this kind. In this way, both learning time and costs can be minimized.

Method for Generating High-quality Shadows With Trapezoidal Shadow Maps Category
Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Tan, Tiow Seng

This invention is a new shadow map technique termed trapezoidal shadow maps to calculate high quality shadows in real-time applications. The method addresses the aliasing problem of standard shadow maps in a novel way: it approximates the camera frustum seen from the light’s view with a trapezoid to compute the shadow map for this trapezoidal area to achieve the goal of good resolution for objects within a focus region, without worsening the polygon offset problem. In addition, it efficiently computes trapezoids (independent of scene complexity) to address the so-called continuity problem where shadows appear and disappear. This problem occurs, in all recent approaches, when the shadow map quality changes drastically from frame to frame due to the change in eye’s view. On the whole, the proposed method is simple to implement without using complex data structures, and it maps well and executes efficiently in graphics hardware.

Innovative Aspects:

• High quality shadows are generated for all large as well as small, curved and sharp objects, and objects from near to far away from the light sources
  
• Shadows generated (for both dynamic and static objects) do not have the annoying flickering effect existed in all previous approaches
  
• The method does not consume much computing resources

More information can be found at: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tants/tsm.html

This technology has a wide range of applications:

• Computer Games: generate quality shadow for computer games (such as PCs or Xbox games) to enhance the gaming experience
  
• Urban Planning Software: generate shadows on the fly for the different Sun’s positions in urban planning studies
  
• Visual Simulators: generate quality shadow for visual simulators to enhance the realism of training and simulation software
  
• Animation Software: generate real-time shadows (for previewing) of computer animation sequences