Latest Press Releases > February 2006

06 February 2006

4th Temasek Young Investigator Award

National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) jointly present the Temasek Young Investigator Award (TYIA) on Monday 6 February 2006 in recognition and support of outstanding researchers in areas that have potential applications for used in defence and national security.

Assistant Professor Terence Sim, Department of Computer Science, NUS School of Computing, has won this year's award for his research on face recognition. The research project would greatly enhance capabilities of face recognition systems, both in terms of speed and robustness.

Mr William Lau, Director of DSTA's Directorate of Research and Development, said: “This project leverages face recognition technology and potentially can be adapted for use with surveillance cameras to enable faster searching and identification of people. It has great potential to support the national security and defence needs in the future.”

On his thoughts about winning the prestigious award, Assistant Professor Sim said, “I'm very honoured and excited - honoured by the recognition given to my work, and excited because I will now be able to further my research and turn it into practical systems.  It is my small contribution to improve the security of Singapore.”

Despite active research in the past three decades, computer recognition of human faces in different pose, lighting, and facial expression remains a very challenging problem.  In his PhD study at Carnegie Mellon University, Assistant Professor Terence Sim developed a new approach to overcome the problem of varying illumination.  From a single frontal image of a face, he computed a whole set of images of the same face under different lighting.  The set of images was then used to train his algorithm to achieve a high level of performance in recognising faces robustly under changing illumination.

For the TYIA project, Assistant Professor Sim will tackle the problem of "extreme recognition", characterised by rapid response times, low image quality, and power-limited computation.  It is a very ambitious project: he will have to devise new features and algorithms that function accurately under challenging conditions.  His approach has the advantage of speed and robustness, and can be expected to contribute significantly to our national security.

Set up in 2002, the TYIA is a collaborative effort between NUS and DSTA.  Awarded annually, the award aims to build up a pool of promising young researchers in NUS to undertake leading research related to defence and security.  The award is open to promising researchers, below 40 years of age, in the Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Science, the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the School of Computing in NUS.

Winners are selected based on merit with particular emphasis on leadership in research and impact potential of the nominee's research on defence and security. Each winner will receive a S$500,000 research grant over a period of 3 years.  A further S$200,000 will be awarded to the host Faculty/School of each winner for 3 years to allow the Faculty/School to reduce the winner's teaching load by half.