2nd Postgraduate Colloquium on STEM held physically for the first time

A colloquium on STEM was organised for the second time at the Faculty of Engineering and Green Technology on 12 October 2022. Titled “2nd Postgraduate Colloquium on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) 2022”, the event aimed to provide an academic platform for researchers to present their research findings in all aspects of STEM to encourage substantive knowledge transfer.

The colloquium was jointly organised by UTAR Faculty of Information and Communication Technology (FICT), Faculty of Engineering and Green Technology (FEGT), Faculty of Science (FSc), Centre for Agriculture and Food Research (CAFR), Centre for Biomedical and Nutrition Research (CBNR), Centre for Environment and Green Technology (CEGT), and Centre for Internet of Things and Big Data (CIoTBD) along with Northwestern Polytechnic University-Federation of Engineering Institutions of Asia and Pacific Belt and Road Engineering Education Training Center (NFTC).

It was mainly sponsored by Intel Technology Sdn Bhd and co-sponsored by Azelis Malaysia Sdn Bhd.

Present at the colloquium were FICT Dean Assoc Prof Ts Dr Liew Soung Yue, FEGT Dean Ir Prof Dr Ng Choon Aun, FSc Dean Assoc Prof Dr Lim Tuck Meng, Deputy Director for Institute of Postgraduate Studies and Research (IPSR), Kampar Campus Prof Dr Sumathi Sethupathi, FICT Deputy Dean for Research and Development and Postgraduate Programmes Assoc Prof Ts Dr Goh Hock Guan, FEGT Deputy Dean for Research and Development and Postgraduate Programmes and judge Dr Lo Po Kim, FSc Deputy Dean for Research and Development and Postgraduate Programmes Dr Phoon Lee Quen; CIoTBD Chairman Dr Tan Joi San, FICT judges and academics Assoc Prof Ts Dr Tan Hung Khoon, Dr Abdulkarim Kanaan Jebna, Dr Mogana Vadiveloo and Ts Dr Chan Lee Kwun; FEGT judge and Head of MEnvTech and MSustConstMgt programmes ChM Ts Dr Tan Kok Weng; FSc judges and academics Dr Lam Ming Quan and Dr Ee Kah Yaw; Azelis Malaysia Sdn Bhd delegate Tan Si Nam; Organising Chairman and UTAR PhD (Computer Science) postgraduate Muhammad Waqas Nadeem; organising committee, UTAR staff and students.

In his opening remarks, Organising Chairman Muhammad Waqas said, “This Postgraduate Colloquium 2022 is set to be a multidisciplinary research colloquium that draws quality research primarily from UTAR postgraduates on a wide variety of important scientific areas. This colloquium, based on the theme ‘Towards Innovative Research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)’, takes into awareness the vital knowledge provided by science, engineering and technology in the advancement of our race. Thus, it aims to create and establish a research network for postgraduate students from various disciplines. It will not only educate us but also guide us about different research domains related to STEM.”

Eager to share his thought before the start of the colloquium, Dr Liew enthused, “This colloquium was jointly organised by many parties of differing disciplines. We make it our main objective to share our ideas and stimulate cross-disciplinary research. Fortunately, we are able to hold this year’s colloquium physically due to the lifting of some pandemic protocols. With this, more sharing and discussion can be done between postgraduate students to enhance the quality and widen the build of the research.”

On behalf of UTAR Vice President for Research and Development and Commercialisation Prof Ts Dr Faidz bin Abd Rahman, Prof Sumathi officially launched the colloquium before receiving a souvenir from Dr Liew.

The colloquium kicked off with a talk given via Microsoft Teams to the participants present at the scene by Intel Corporation SoC Validation Engineer Lim Ghim Boon. His talk titled “Challenges and the opportunities of AI in Chip Design Engineering” revolved around the processes of designing and engineering chip as well as the advancement opportunities that AI brings to the field of chip design engineering. “Chip design engineering is a very complex process. It is not something you can just do alone, with 10 people or even 100 people. You have to take into account the massive cost expectation, efficiency of the methodology used, expected performance, demands of the market, and many convoluted technical challenges faced along the way,” Lim said, before getting into the details.

In his talk, Lim introduced the steps in designing a chip. He elucidated the processes involved, the challenges faced by the engineers, and the solutions to face the challenges in each step. Furthermore, Lim introduced the structures of AI and shared a few opportunities and solutions provided by the newfound AI method in advancing chip design engineering. “There may come a time when AI can research, engineer and design chip. There are still a lot of opportunities we can garner from AI and its vast utility can be observed in many areas besides chip design engineering,” explained Lim.

The second speaker, Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science academic Prof Dr Yau Kok Lim, enlightened the audience on the concept of reinforcement learning in his talk titled “Reinforcement Learning Fundamentals and Applications”. He said, “Reinforcement learning is an ‘old but new’ term to many people since it was only popularised in the past few years considering it was originally invented in the 1950s. This method taught a computer program named ‘AlphaZero’ to win against the world’s strongest chess-playing program which led to its popularity.”

Prof Yau gave a detailed explanation of the processes and problems involved in Reinforcement Learning, Multiagent Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Learning and also Deep Reinforcement Learning. While explaining the concepts, he shared his students’ research on the possible areas of reinforcement learning applications such as wireless networks and traffic lights. He stopped for a brief moment and posed the question by saying, “Do we really need AI in the system? It makes the system too complex and even makes the system vulnerable to a malicious agent or manipulative environment. One day, we teach a robot to cut vegetables with a knife; the next day, we might get attacked by the same robot with the knife. AI sounds cool but surely has its unknown properties we are still trying to discover.”

The third speaker, FSc academic Dr Chang Sui Kiat, shed light on bioactive compounds with his talk titled “Novel bioactive ‘geranylated resveratrol’ produced by prenyltransferase-involved biotransformation”. His talk mainly covered his research on functional food and synthetic biology. Before getting into the details of the research, he briefly introduced functional food and its health benefits. A type of bioactive compound called prenylated stilbenoids can be either found naturally in functional food or synthesised through three different methods, namely silica gel chromatography, chemical synthesis and synthetic biology. Among the three methods, he stated that synthetic biology is more efficient and environment-friendly which is suitable for various industries. “Synthetic biology is a technique used to produce and enable innovation in our food and agricultural system. It has been used in our food production system for about 10 to 15 years,” said Dr Chang.

He shared that synthetic biology is getting more popular due to many people opting for a vegan lifestyle. To adapt, the food industry has introduced various animal-free products such as cultured meat. Furthermore, he introduced his research on heterologous biosynthesis, in which his team investigated prenylated compounds using various methods. Before ending his talk, he shared with audience the concept of “personalised medicine”. He enthused, “Different supplements used by different people can have varying bioactivity and efficacy. That’s why it is not easy to improve functional food, products or supplements as there are still many uncertainties to be explored.”

The fourth and final speaker, Professor of Institute of Flexible Electronics, Northwestern Polytechnical University of China, Prof Li Peng shared his research on water decontamination using various photochemical and electrochemical technologies in his talk titled “Photo and Electrochemical Technologies for Disinfection and Decontamination” via Microsoft Teams. Before diving into the main topic, he gave a brief history of antibiotics and their side effects. He said, “We are currently living in a post-antibiotic era where a lot of superbugs exist. They are resistant to many forms of antibiotics; therefore, it is very hard to eliminate them using traditional therapy.” He even pointed out the crisis faced by humans in which clean water is scarce due to heavy water contamination by bacteria and heavy metals.

As an effort to mitigate the water contamination and infection issues, he introduced a few research in which he and his team investigated various methods to eliminate bacteria and heavy metals from the water. The first research introduced non-antibiotic chemotherapy which explored three types of resistance mechanisms of cationic antimicrobial peptides to dispose of multidrug resistant bacteria (MDR), namely membrane destructive mechanism, non-destructive membrane disturbance mechanism and intracellular targeting mechanism. The other three research focused on exploring new methods to synthesise antimicrobial peptides (AMP) which can be used as an alternative to eliminate MDR; investigating the effectiveness of phototherapy in removing MDR, and investigating the old and modern methods of electrodynamic therapy in water purification.

Between the talks given by the invited speakers, four separate tracks of research topic presentations were given by postgraduate students from FICT, FEGT and FSc. The presentations were evaluated by the respective judges; the best presenter and runner-up were then selected from each track. Cash prizes were handed to all the best presenters and runners-up by FEGT Dean Prof Ng.

The best presenters and runners-up are as follows:

Track 1
Data Science and Big Data

Name	Award	Title
See Jin Chuan	Best Presenter	DoubleQExt: Hardware and Memory Efficient CNN Through Two Levels of Quantisation
Zhang Ting	Runner-up	GraphAT-NET: A Rainfall Prediction Network Based on GCN and Attention Mechanism

Track 2
Information Technology Management

Name	Award	Title
Low Min Chi	Best Presenter	The Exploratory Study on the Perception of Engineering Students on Blended Learning Based on a Case Study in Malaysia
Wong Chee Siang	Runner-up	Multi-tier Vehicle Routing Algorithm for Pickup-and-Delivery Problem with Deadline Constraint

Track 3
Green Engineering Technology and Smart IoT/Security/Applications

Name	Award	Title
Cheah Shi Yan	Best Presenter	Chemogenic Synthesis of Chromium Oxide Nanoparticles using Sol-Gel Method and its Antioxidant, Pancreatic Lipase, and α-amylase Inhibition
Oh Zi Xin	Runner-up	Split-Ring Resonator-Based Sensors for Dielectric Constant Measurement

Track 4
Biotechnology for Sustainable Development

Name	Award	Title
Dharshini Selvam	Best Presenter	Characterisation of a Novel Phage Endolysin from Hot Spring Bacteriophage KW01-E
Ong Chin Yin	Runner-up	Flower Preference of the Insect Parasitoid, Pediobius imbrues of the Oil Palm Bagworm, Metisa plana

A closing speech was given by FSc Dean Dr Lim to mark the end of the colloquium. He appreciated the researchers’ effort in reinvigorating the advancement of STEM research. “We have suffered a lot for the past few years due to the pandemic. Researchers should carry on this effort and make a breakthrough for the sake of science, technology and humanity. Each of us is contributing a little bit, but this little bit will expand human knowledge of nature and how we will move forward. I hope this colloquium will continue for years,” said Dr Lim.