Dr. Anthony TamAcademic AdvisorDepartment of Computer Science

INFORMATION SESSION

AGENDA• About Department of Computer Science

•What is Computer Science?

• BEng(CompSc) programme

• Student Life

• A Taste of Computer Science

• Computer Science Research

HKU Department of Computer Science• Formally established within the Faculty of Engineering in 1988

• The youngest and fastest developing department in the Faculty

• Computer studies courses were first taught in HKU in 1975• the first bachelor degree in Computer Studies was offered

under the Faculty of Science in 1982• the MSc(CompSc) programme was first offered in 1991

What is Computer Science?

Computer Science is about:

砌機 ?

寫網頁 ?

using photoshop ?

寫 app ?

微軟證書考試 ?

What is Computer Science ?• Computer science is not just about programming and

studying the computers, but rather it is about problem solving – the study of algorithms and information representation to make productive use of computing technologies.

Theory & Knowledge (Computing)+

Applications =

Computer Science Studies

Highlights of BEng(CompSc) Programme• Flexibility• Students can select electives from a wide variety of courses• Can use the credits to satisfy the minor programme or some courses under the double

degree or 2nd major programme

• Accreditation• The programme is accredited by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE)

• Internship• Students may spend 8-12 weeks (during summer) to 1 year of paid work experience and

professional development in the industry

• Final year project• Students may choose amongst research-based projects, software development projects,

and industry-based projects as their Capstone Experience.

• Research opportunity• Outstanding students are having the opportunities to undertake research under the

University Research Fellowship Programme.

Computer Science Curriculum

Core fields: programming, mathematics,

algorithms, data structures, database,

operating systems, computer

organization, networking,

software engineering, and professionalism.

Selections: artificial intelligence, computer graphics,

computer vision, mobile app development, multimedia, e-commerce, computer game design, network security,

etc.

2013 Admissions – Important Information• JUPAS Code – JS6963

• Entrance Requirements• English Language Level 3• Chinese Language Level 3• Mathematics Level 3• Liberal Studies Level 2• Two Electives Level 3• One of the electives must be Physics or Combined Science with Physics

components

• Mathematics (Extended Module 1 or Module 2)

Level 3 • Preferred but not required

We are going to have a new set of Entrance Requirements starting from 2014 Admissions

STUDENT LIFE

Activity – 網絡的疑惑

A TASTE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Networks are everywhere

Network Problems•We often need to work out the most efficient way to build the networks• Roads to connect cities• Gas pipes to houses, buildings• etc . . .

Network Graph

houses

The cost to build gas pipe between houses

cities

The cost to build road to link up cities

Muddy City ProblemMuddy City – a city that had no roads.After raining, cars got stuck in the mud and people got their boots dirty.

The mayor decided to pave some of the streets, but didn’t want to spend more money than necessaryCareful planning

Find the best route that connects all thehouses, but uses as few paving stones as possible.

Minimum Spanning Tree ( 最小生成樹 )

A subgraph that is a tree and that reaches out to all nodes of the original graph with the least total cost.

Minimum paving cost is to use 23 paving stones.

Exercise

What strategy did you use to solve the problem?

Could your strategy be used by the computer?

Solution

What strategy can we use to solve the problem?

Kruskal's Algorithm

start with no connections repeat

pick an unused minimum cost pathonly add the path if it connects new

node(s)mark this path as used

until all of the nodes are linked

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Many practical graph problems!• Shortest path problem

• Traveling salesman problem

• … many many …

COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCHis about taking advantage of fast data processing to solve problems that are otherwise infeasible

Research Groups & Focus• Algorithms and Bioinformatics• Algorithms: Design & Analysis of Algorithm, Scheduling, Metric Space Embedding, Data

Privacy, etc.• Bioinformatics: Motif Discovery, Genome Assembly, & Alignment, etc.

• Data and Software Engineering• Data Mining, Uncertainty Database, Spatial Database, Cloud Database Security, Big Data

Analytics, Software Testing, etc.

• HCI, Graphics and Computer Vision• Geometrical Model, Visualization, Animation, Image Processing, Computer Vision, Texture

Mapping and HCI, etc.

• Information Security and Forensics• Network Security, Computer Forensics, etc.

• Systems and Networking• Parallel and Distributed Systems, Grid & Cluster Computing, P2P Network, Cloud

Computing, etc.

Example: DNA SequencingDNA is a molecule that encodes genetic information in the form of a double helix structure.

Two strands, each is a sequence of simple units called nucleotides (A,C,T, and G; informally, known as bases).

Human DNA: about 3 billion bases long.

DNA Sequencing Assembly• Method: Sequencing machines chop up a DNA into small (overlapping) fragments (called reads), and obtain the sequences of the reads through bio-chemical processes.• A read consists of a few hundred bases• Given many many reads, can we merge these reads and

reconstruct the original DNA sequence?

The Challenge“The problem of sequence assembly can be compared to taking many copies of a book, passing them all through a shredder, and piecing the text of the book back together just by looking at the shredded pieces. Besides the obvious difficulty of this task, there are some extra practical issues: the original may have many repeated paragraphs, and some shreds may be modified during shredding to have typos. Excerpts from another book may also be added in, and some shreds may be completely unrecognizable.”

Source: Wikipedia

DNA Sequencing Assembly• The human DNA is very long (3,000,000,000 bases) and reads are short (a few hundred bases). The jigsaw puzzle is HUGE. • The first complete human DNA sequence was published as a result of the HUMAN GENOME PROJECT.• The project was started in 1988 and was completed in 2003 --- a 15-year effort.• 10 years ago, it takes several weeks to sequence a human DNA for USD 100M.• In 2012, it is 1 day and USD 1,000.

ImpactsIt opens up a whole new world of clinical diagnostics.

Applications on HPC• Most are Scientific & Engineering applications

Weather forecastingGraphic renderingSimulation

Drug design

Medical imaging (image construction)

Protein structure prediction

The computing power that created Avatar

• The cluster comprises a total of 4,000 HP blade computers (with 40,000 cores, 104 terabytes of physical memory using 10 Gb/s network).

• It still needed 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.