Professor Joseph Ng Catches Spirit of High-tech Olympics with Innovative Wi-Fi System

21 Aug 2008

Professor Joseph Ng of the Department of Computer Science recently led his research team in a technical consultancy project carried out for the Hong Kong Tourism Board. The project involved designing an innovative and interactive Wi-Fi positioning application system for use at the Hong Kong Olympic Piazza, located next to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

The system allows visitors to make novel use of a PDA phone as they move around the Piazza to view content about the Olympics, to play Olympics-related games, and also to find out about tourist attractions in Hong Kong. The system is server-based and thus does not require the downloading of software before viewing the content.

In the Olympic Treasure Hunt, visitors move around the Piazza to hunt for correct answers to questions about the Olympic. As visitors move from place to place, the PDA phone simultaneously identifies their location in order to determine if they have found a correct answer. “Given the limited timeframe, this was an extremely challenging and remarkable project. I will continue to dedicate my efforts to expanding similar Wi-Fi positioning applications so that they can be useful for a much broader scope of public services, so that more people can enjoy the benefits,” said Professor Ng.

Professor Joseph Ng is an internationally recognised expert in ubiquitous computing. He received a patent from the German Patent Office in 2006 for his project “Clock Synchronization in Nodes on a Ring Bus”, carried out in collaboration with scholars of Fern University in Germany and an HKBU research graduate. For details, please browse http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~cpro/enews2006/20060321a.htm.