Real-time embedded systems are prevalent in our modern society, ranging from simple microwave ovens controlled by an 8-bit processor, to complex spacecraft containing thousands of processors. Software development for embedded systems is often more difficult than for desktop applications, due to the presence of resource constraints and non-functional requirements, such as real-time, low-power and fault-tolerance. The research focuses on techniques for component-based modeling, analysis and implementation of embedded systems and software. Another good example of embedded system is the Octopus card we use every day. It is a piece of hardware and the computer program that reads the data stored in the card is a piece of software. It is essential that both hardware and software must work together and interact smoothly so as to ensure the functionality and reliability of the overall system.

With an increasing number of machine and collective portable vision applications requiring a large number of networked smart sensors, it is becoming critical to build miniaturized collaborative vision sensors consuming little power and able to preprocess, communicate information and make smart decisions.
The Smart Sensory Integrated Systems (S2IS) Lab is performing research in the area of VLSI design and implementation of smart low power and low cost sensors including visual and olfactory systems. A particularly interesting aspect of this research lies in the combination of expertise from the areas of integrated circuits, systems and sensors design as well as signal/image processing algorithms and their VLSI implementation. To this end, this research area can be best described as being in the crossroads between algorithmic solutions and hardware friendly VLSI architecture for sensors applications (vision sensors as well as gas sensors and olfactory systems). The aim behind implementing such algorithmic solutions in CMOS VLSI technologies is to be able to build smart Microsystems in which sensing and processing are integrated as closely as possible hence achieving low cost and low power. This technology will have a large impact on a number of applications such as automobile, security, environmental monitoring and tracking, as well as health monitoring, medical diagnosis and minimal invasive surgery.

In communications, storage and computing systems, coding refers to the digital encoding and decoding of an information signal to make it more suitable for an intended application, such as optimizing the signal for transmission, improving transmission quality and fidelity, modifying the signal spectrum, increasing the information content, providing error detection and/or correction, and providing data security. The importance of coding was first established by Shannon's information theory which predicts the fundamental limits in representing, hiding, transmitting and/or storing information. Practical applications of sophisticated coding techniques can be found in many consumer products such as the mobile phones, the digital cameras and the DVDs. At HKUST, coding-related researches span several areas in Electronic Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science, including wireless communications, data compression, and cryptographic schemes.

Computer Music is an interdisciplinary area including computer science, music, digital signal processing, musical acoustics, and music perception. Its applications include music synthesis, music information retrieval, automatic signal separation (WAV-to-MIDI conversion), and music on mobile phones. Prof. Andrew Horner specializes in Computer Music (http://www.cs.ust.hk/~horner).

The general areas of High Speed Network includes the design, analysis, scheduling, and management of high-speed switches/routers, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks/switches, and wireless networks. In particular, a research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is designing one the highest capacity chip sets for Terabit switches/routers in the world. This chip set is targeted towards a 256 x 256 OC-192 Internet switches, and includes a crossbar fabric chip, a scheduler/arbiter chip, and a traffic management chip.

Low-power low-noise analog/mixed integrated circuits (IC) design is a fast-growing area, with bright application prospects. High performance analog/mixed-signal ICs are used in wireless communications, bio-medical devices, automobile electronics, consumer electronics. The design requires a multi-disciplinary background from electromagnetics, semiconductor devices, analog circuits, digital circuits, signal processing, stochastic processes, programming. Current projects include low-power data converters, bio-sensor detection circuits, CMOS image sensors, tft LCD driving circuits.

Multimedia and wireless networking refers to research and development in streaming media over the Internet and wireless networks. It requires an understanding in both hardware and software technologies so that the limitations in one can be overcome by the innovations of the other. For example, the limitation in power and processing capability in wireless devices can often be amended by the design of distributed power-efficient algorithms/protocols, while software codes may be turned to chips for efficiency. We address various networking aspects including distributed protocols, mitigation of noise and transmission errors, low-power processing and scalable network architecture. Research in the area spans from hardware-software co-design (e.g., cross-layer optimization), multimedia processing for network transmission (e.g., network coding), peer-to-peer networks and streaming, wireless sensor network, cellular and 3G network architecture and design, etc.

Computer processing of human speech and language is an interdisciplinary area that requires the knowledge and background of both computer science and electronic engineering, such as signal processing, pattern recognition, stochastic processes and statistical modeling, and software engineering. Its diverse applications include machine translation, automatic speech recognition, natural language search, as well as information extraction. The Human Language Technology Center (HLTC) (http://www.cs.ust.hk/~hltc) at HKUST, is a joint departmental research centre between the Electronic and Computer Engineering Department and Computer Science & Engineering Department. Current research projects in HLTC include spoken language translation, Mandarin spontaneous speech recognition, statistical machine translation, acoustic feature extraction, language identification, etc. Past projects and systems built by HLTC includes state-of-the-art multilingual voice browser, Mandarin telephony speech recognition, automatic Mandarin learning system, speech translation on handheld devices, etc.

Wireless communication is a very hot topic of interest in both the commercial and academic research community. For example, we have the cellular technologies (such as GSM, GPRS, 3G, 3.5G and 4G) as well as short range wireless technologies (bluetooth, Ultrawideband (UWB) systems, ZiBee, Wireless LAN etc). These various wireless systems are designed with various goals such as offering high data rate reliably, providing high coverage, reducing power consumption, utilizing only a limited bandwidth...etc. These goals are obviously conflicting with each other and careful tradeoff is needed. In addition, a complete wireless system involves many aspects of knowledge ranging from physical layer design (information theory) to system design as well as networking (queueing theory). At HKUST, the wireless system research group in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) consists of world-class faculties with complementary expertise spanning across the wide spectrum of wireless domain from physical layer design, signal processing, information theory and networking.