Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu, Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence at Lingnan University.
Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu, Associate Vice-President (Strategic Research) and Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence of Lingnan University, co-authored the research paper that has received the Best Paper, Chester W. Sall Memorial Awards 2024 from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organisation dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. This honour was published in their monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal “IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics”. Only three Best Paper Awards are given each year, and the competition is extremely fierce.
Prof Kwong’s groundbreaking study, "Boundary Guided Semantic Learning for Real-Time COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation System", proposes a cutting-edge algorithm, the “boundary guided semantic learning network” (BSNet), which automatically segments lung infection areas from CT scans, addressing common issues related to slow, incomplete, and unclear boundary detection. This increases accuracy in diagnosing COVID-19 virus infections, facilitating auxiliary diagnosis. The paper has gained widespread attention since its publication, and been selected for Popular Documents in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics for seven consecutive months from October 2022 to April 2023.
Prof Kwong said: "The novel method we proposed achieves significant accuracy and efficiency in segmenting lung infection areas in CT images. When compared to 11 current state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates remarkable accuracy and efficiency under six evaluation metrics. Besides, the new method has a real-time inference speed, overcoming limitations of existing technologies. This breakthrough has significant implications for the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 virus infections. I believe that BSNet can swiftly transition to impact segmentation tasks in other lung diseases, generating a positive impact on global AI-assisted healthcare."
Prof Kwong has been recognised as one of the leading scientists in the field of computational intelligence. He has recently been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences (HKAES), and named Highly Cited Researcher 2023 by Clarivate. He has also received numerous international honours for fundamental contributions to his profession, including being listed in Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists. In 2014, Prof Kwong was made an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to optimisation techniques in cybernetics and video coding. He became a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) in 2022 and was President of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) from 2021-23.
The full paper can be read here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9882382.
About the Chester W. Sall Memorial Awards
This set of awards recognises the best papers published in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. A first, second and third place Best Paper Award is given and presented at the 2024 International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE).
