KUCHING – In a shared vision to build the next generation of talent in technology, Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak and NEUON AI Sdn Bhd aim to establish academic and research collaborations with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in a recent ceremony held at the university’s campus.
NEUON AI is a Sarawakian artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops its own in-house tech, specialising in machine learning, computer vision, and Internet of Things (IoT). From an academic perspective, Swinburne will work closely NEUON AI to develop the Applied Machine Learning (AML) unit which focuses on advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques in its Bachelor of Computer Science programme.
Led by Swinburne Head of School of Information and Communications Technologies Professor Patrick Then and his team, lecturers Dr Brian Loh and Dr Lee Sue Han, the industry partnership is in line with Swinburne’s Horizon 2025 vision of bringing people and technology together to build a better world, creating the technology of tomorrow and the human talent needed for a digital and technology-rich future. Among the aims of the collaboration are to fill the skill gap for students to meet the needs of today’s industry and to enhance students’ employability with direct links to industry partners.
Aside from giving students the platform to put their skills into practice, computer science students at Swinburne will work together with NEUON AI on AI-related Final-Year Projects (FYP). FYPs are projects undertaken by final-year students as part of their course curriculum, whereby students are given the opportunity to experience work integrated learning and real-world industry practices while in their undergraduate studies.
Among these includes a project on crowdsourcing image analysis for plant disease identification. This project aims to embrace the concept of crowdsourcing and citizen science, presented in the form of an easily accessible plant disease observation tool that can be used by anyone in the field. Such a tool will facilitate the accumulation of data and knowledge from the contributions of users, expert or non-expert merely through its usage.
In addition, students will also be tasked to develop a web-based image annotation tool with a user-friendly interface to easily delegate annotation tasks to different people. The tool which will be used for quality control of annotation standards and reward annotators based on their performance, will act as an extension to the existing classification and object detection annotation NADIA software developed by NEUON AI.
Furthermore, with the importance of quality control and quality assurance (QAQC) in manufacturing, NEUON AI has applied AI computer vision and IoT technology in its inspection process to replace manual product inspections. While students who participate will collaborate on the automated object inspection process, the project targets to further systematically digitise the entire daily manufacturing operation from the inventory management, product management to warehouse management as well as logistic management.
With Swinburne’s Horizon 2025 moon shot of providing every Swinburne learner work experience, by partnering with NEUON AI on their final-year projects, students will learn to apply their problem analysis skills and produce innovative solutions to real-world problems using contemporary tools and technologies.
NEUON AI is keen to upgrade the skills of its employees, particularly in the field of AI and machine learning. Therefore, with the support of the company, one of its employees will be following a master’s level research programme at Swinburne and work with Swinburne’s AI experts to improve innovation through knowledge exchange. Specifically, the research collaboration between the two parties will be initiated by a research project entitled ‘Explainable deep learning in cross-domain plant identification on herbarium-field pairs’.
According to CEO of NEUON AI Dr Chai Kok Chin, it is in the company’s interest to collaborate with local universities such as Swinburne in the field of technology, and to contribute to the growth of Sarawakian talent in artificial intelligence and technology.
In line with the growing market of jobs of the future, Swinburne Sarawak offers a three-year Bachelor of Computer Science programme with majors in software development, cybersecurity, IoT, data science, and AI. Another programme which is the three-year Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology focuses on computer and network configurations, web and application programming, and database design and maintenance. Both programmes are accredited at the professional level by the Australian Computer Society (ACS).
Apart from the undergraduate programmes, Swinburne also offers the Master of Information Technology that provides students the opportunity to apply their skills through industry-related project work, including industry-linked projects for real clients. Complementing these programmes are state-of-the-art facilities and laboratories including the cybersecurity, AI and the IoT laboratories at Swinburne.
For more information about Swinburne, visit its website www.swinburne.edu.my, Facebook page (@swinburnesarawak), Instagram (@swinburnesarawak), Twitter page (@Swinburne_Swk) or YouTube channel (Swinburne Sarawak).