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First Doctoral Students’ Poster Day highlights PhD research focus at XJTLU


PhD students took part in the First Doctoral Students’ Poster Day at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) on April 24th.

 

 

The event aims to foster a strong and vibrant postgraduate research community at XJTLU, and to serve as a networking event where learning, feedback and information are freely exchanged between subject areas and departments, in a friendly and supportive environment.To add further interest, the event included a competition for the best posters. Following an afternoon of academic adjudication and voting, the first prize was awarded to Ms. Zhi Jin from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for her work on 3D video enhancement. Ebrahim Gozali and Mehdi Pazhoohesh from the Department of Civil Engineering came second and third respectively, while Yang Wu from the Department of English, Culture and Communication won an award for “Most popular” poster.

 

 

As a member of a project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Zhi Jin described her solutions for “Low resolution 3D video enhancement” during the poster day. She explained how 3D videography has becomes increasingly popular in recent years and that one commonly used 3D format combines 2D videos with distance information of objects in the scene. It requires much more bandwidth than conventional 2D video since more data needs to be transmitted through the network. In this situation, the ability to combine high quality visual effects while also compressing the resource is crucial.“In this project, we proposed to reduce the spatial size of left-eye and right-eye videos from the sender by discarding half of the height, and then recovering the non-transmitted data at receiver side”, Zhi explained.

 

 

Mehdi Pazhoohesh, a second year PhD student from the Department of Civil Engineering, presented his research about “Smart Energy for Buildings”. He explained that the energy used in the built environment accounts for nearly 38% of the total energy use in the United Kingdom. Most of the energy (nearly 87% for non-residential) in the built environment is used for building systems, with the goal of providing increased comfort for the buildings’ occupants.Mr. Pazhoohesh said that he hopes to set up a management control system, which could improve human comfort while also saving energy. One method he suggested would see the use of sensors and infra-red cameras placed in different rooms around the house, which would automatically read people’s position and temperature changes and that could then be adjusted via a computer. 
“For example, you walk to the restroom from your office to get a cup of coffee; the system will automatically reduce the temperature of the office and raise the temperature of the restroom. Your body temperature will rise after you drink coffee, so the office temperature will automatically adjust to a proper level when you come back to the office”, Mehdi explained. The greatest advantage of this system is that it can reduce energy waste - a year’s energy consumption can be reduced by as much as 17%. Mehdi was keen to add that it’s not expensive either adding that ”each sensor only costs about 100 RMB."

 

 

 

Professor David O’Connor, Dean of Research & Graduate School at XJTLU, commented that the Postgraduate Poster Day gave doctoral students valuable opportunities for public communication as well as a chance to present their research to an educated public in fields outside their immediate research interests. “The posters are fabulous and striking – so many of them are visually pleasing” Professor O’Connor said, adding that “the judges asked some quite tough questions to the candidate but they performed well”.

“The significance of the event is that it is the most common way to get a research message across in an academic conference. It’s a skill all of our students need. Accordingly, when judging, we look at the poster but we also want to find out how well the students answer questions on their topics. After you see a poster, you should want to interact with the person presenting it, and that student should also be able to answer difficult questions to a professional academic standard”, added Professor O’Connor.
 XJTLU Vice-President, Professor David Sadler commented that this event was proof of a vibrant research community. It also gives the PhD students great opportunities to gain feedback on their presentation and research from senior academics and fellow research students.


 

XJTLU’s PhD programmes began in March 2009 as a strategic collaboration between XJTLU and the University of Liverpool, UK. Graduates are formally registered with Liverpool as off-site doctoral students, and each is appointed a primary supervisor from XJTLU and a secondary supervisor from Liverpool.