MMU Shares Expertise In Setting Up the UniSZA Digital Hub

Our university was invited to share its expertise with Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA) in a collaboration to set up the UniSZa Digital Hub, which was launched on 8th March 2017 at Besut, Terengganu. The ceremony was graced by Dato’ Seri Idris Jusoh, the Minister of Higher Education and attended by Prof. Datuk Dr. Ahmad Rafi Mohamed Eshaq, the President of MMU and Prof. Dato' Dr. Ahmad Zubaidi Abdul Latif, the Vice Chancellor of UniSZa. At the ceremony, the minister applauded the collaboration which will focusing on the digital technology domain to create and catalyse opportunities for Research and Innovation of higher learning sector in Malaysia

Tan Sri Zam shared his insight at MMU's Executive Talk

On 4 August 2016, YBhg. Tan Sri Dato' Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, the Managing Director and Group Chief Executive Officer of Telekom Malaysia shared his insight in the Executive Talk GCEO on the topic of 'Strategic Communication' at Multimedia University (MMU). The talk was attended by more than 50 students of Foundation In English (FIE), Bachelor of Strategic Communication (B.Comm) as well as Faculty of Management (FOM). Also present, Prof. Ahmad Ra Mohamed Eshaq, the President of MMU and Associate Professor Dr. Madhubala Bava Harji, the Dean of Learning Institute for Empowerment (LiFE). In the two hours eye-opening speech, he shared the broad spectrum of strategic communications particularly in the global, national and TM's point of view. The audience learnt how TM manage to face the challenges of executing the vision to be the Convergence Champion and Go Digital programme which in line with Life Made Easier slogan through the effective internal and external communications

Firming Research Culture and Practices in Science & Technology

Over 100 researchers and academic members from all faculties in MMU participated in a one-day workshop on journal writing & publication for science and technology on 15 March 2017 at Cyberjaya campus and on 16 March 2017 at Melaka campus. It was co-organised by MMU Library and Research Management Centre (RMC) with the support of IEEE ComSoc/VTS Malaysia, IEEE Young Professional Malaysia & United Technology Sdn. Bhd. (IEEE Representative in Malaysia). The workshop was graced by the then Vice President (R&D), Prof. Dr. Heng Swee Huay at Melaka and the Chief Librarian, Kamal Sujak in Cyberjaya. Edward Kennedy from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tan Ai Hui from FOE, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. You Ah Heng from FET as the featured speakers, inspired the participants to prepare manuscripts and get them published in journals or conferences. They also shared a lot of useful tips and hints during the workshop. With the strong partnership between MMU Library, departments & societies, the organiser expected to have more authorship workshops will be organised to catalyse research culture among the innovative MMU community. The targeted increase in the utilisation of library resources is essential to boost MMU, going forward “to be a Top 100 University in Asia with Global Recognition by 2020”

Robust video transmission using reversible watermarking techniques

This paper presents a novel error-resilient strategy which employs a reversible watermarking technique to protect the H.264/AVC video content. The proposed scheme adopts reversible watermarking to embed an error detection codeword within every Macro block (MB). The watermark is then extracted at the decoder and used to detect the corrupted MBs to be concealed. The proposed scheme further manages to recover the original video content after watermark extraction, thus providing no loss in video quality. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a substantial gain of up to 2.6 dB in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) relative to the standard with a minimal increase in complexity.peer-reviewe

Continuous affect state annotation using a joystick-based user interface

Ongoing research at the DLR (German Aerospace Center) aims to employ affective computing techniques to ascertain the emotional states of users in motion simulators. In this work, a novel user feedback interface employing a joystick to acquire subjective evaluation of the affective experience is presented. This interface allows the subjects to continuously annotate their affect states, elicited in this scenario by watching video clips. Several physiological parameters (e.g. heart rate, electrodermal activity, respiration rate, etc.) were acquired during the viewing session. A statistical analysis is presented, which shows expected patterns in data that validate the design and methodology of the experiment and lay the groundwork for further experiments to be undertaken at the DLR

Improved quality of experience of reconstructed H.264/AVC encoded video sequences through robust pixel domain error detection

The transmission of H.264/AVC encoded sequences over noisy wireless channels generally adopt the error detection capabilities of the transport protocol to identify and discard corrupted slices. All the macroblocks (MBs) within each corrupted slice are then concealed. This paper presents an algorithm that does not discard the corrupted slices but tries to detect those MBs which provide major visual artefacts and then conceal only these MBs. Results show that the proposed solution, based on a set of image-level features and two Support Vector Machines (SVMs), manages to detect 94.6% of those artefacts. Gains in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR) of up to 5.74 dB have been obtained when compared to the standard H.264/AVC decoder.peer-reviewe

Applying prediction techniques to reduce uplink transmission and energy requirements in mobile free-viewpoint video applications

The increased efficiency of video compression algorithms, the improvements registered in reliability, data rates and quality of service of wireless transmission technologies, and the development of mobile multimedia terminals have made possible the implementation of Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) technology on mobile platforms. The mobile environment however presents several restrictions. Two of these limiting factors being bandwidth constraints and energy availability in battery-operated mobile terminals. This paper looks at the possibility of employing prediction algorithms at the FVV server to anticipate the next viewpoint expected by the user. In doing so, the number of uplink requests is reduced to situations where the estimated view defers from the requested one and the associated transmissions required in retraining the algorithm once this occurs. Simulation results on two different prediction techniques demonstrate that the uplink transmission rate is reduced by up to 96.7% when emulating a conventional FVV usage scenario. Both prediction algorithms infer a substantial decrease in the mobile terminal’s power consumption and reduce the network’s uplink bandwidth utilization.peer-reviewe

A Web-based multimedia collaboratory. Empirical work studies in film archives

This report represents the latest study in the activity on Ecological Information Systems conducted in the Center for Human Machine Interaction situated at Ris National Laboratory and the University of Aarhus. The purpose of this activity is to give a description of the characteristics of work domains that will serve to outline the general context of concern to design of collaboratories. In addition, a set of preliminary implications for the design of a collaboratory are derived from the cognitive work analysis. To anticipate, further research on this approach to the design of collaboratories will show how the preceding analysis is likely to lead to a novel theoretical framework, called Ecological Collaborative Information Systems (ECIS), required for the design of collaboratories. The intention is to illustrate how the general principles of ECIS can be instantiated to develop a concrete design product: A crossdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboratory to support customer service and professional research in archives. A web based Collaboratory Numerous valuable historic and cultural films and their sources are scattered in various national archives. Knowledge and usage of the multinational film material are severely impeded by access problems. To fully exploit the cultural film heritage internationally, a high degree of cross-disciplinary and international collaboration among professionals working with the film media is required. The Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material (Collate) is intended to foster and support collaboration on research, cultural mediation and preservation of films through a distributed multimedia repository. The collaboratory will provide webbased tools and interfac..