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Past Students

I have been fortunate enough to have supervised many very talented students. Here is a partial list with links to their email addresses and dissertations.

Chi Chiu TSANG, "Error Reduction Techniques for a MEMS Accelerometer-based Digital Input Device", MPhil, 2008. pdf.

Kuen Hung TSOI, "A Flexible Arithmetic System for Simulation", PhD, 2007. pdf.

C.T. Chow, "A Single Chip Carbon Nanotube Sensor", MPhil, 2007. pdf.

Y.M. LAM, "Speech Synthesis from Surface Electromyogram Signals", PhD, 2006. pdf.

C.K. WONG, "A Decimated Electronic Cochlea on a Reconfigurable Platform", MPhil, 2006. pdf.

Brian M.H. LI, "Variable Block Size Motion Estimation Hardware for Video Encoders", MPhil, 2006. pdf.

C.L. YUEN, "Low Power Wireless Sensor Applications", MPhil, 2004. pdf.

Chun Hok HO, "Automatic Synthesis and Optimization of Floating Point Hardware", MPhil, 2003. pdf.

Yuet Ming LAM, "An Optimization Framework for Fixed-point Digital Signal Processing", MPhil, 2003. pdf.

Ocean Yu Hoi Cheung, "Implementation of an FPGA based Accelerator for Virtual Private Networks", MPhil, 2002. pdf.

Kuen Hung TSOI, "Cryptographic Primitives on Reconfigurable Platforms", MPhil, 2002. pdf.

Norris Monk Ping LEONG, "FPGA Design Methologies for High Performance Applications", PhD, 2001. pdf.

Hiu Yung WONG, "Matching Properties and Applications of Compatible Lateral Bipolar Transistors", MPhil, 2001. pdf.

Ivan Ka Ho LEUNG, "A Microcoded Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Processor", MPhil, 2001. pdf.

Daniel Tak Tsung SUEN, "Elliptic Curve Cryptography: Schoof's Algorithm on Fields of Characteristic Two", MSc, 2000. pdf. ]]>

DELTA08 Conference

Attended the DELTA08 conference in Hong Kong where I gave an invited talk in a special session on "High Performance Reconfigurable Computing." Here is a link to the paper.

10 Sonnets Concerning Field Programmable Technology

At the International Conference on Field Programmable Technology (FPT), I gave an invited talk in a panel session entitled "What's exciting about FPT".

In my talk, I presented 10 sonnets about FPT and a copy of my slides are available here. I encourage others to write their own FPT poetry.

FPL Outstanding Paper Award

We won the FPL outstanding paper award this year. More information is available here.

Research position in our lab

Research Assistant / Postdoctoral Fellow Position

Our group is seeking a motivated individual for a 1 year government funded appointment commencing November 2007. The project involves developing tools to compile financial engineering Monte Carlo simulation applications to a high level synthesis language such as Handel-C. The ideal applicant would have experience in one or more of the following areas: reconfigurable computing, financial engineering and compiler construction.

Flying with the Government Flying Service

Was fortunate enough to be invited by my colleague, Prof. K.H. Wong, to join a pretend search and rescue mission with the HK Government Flying Service this afternoon. The aim was to test software that they developed. Here are the pictures.

Forster fishing and camping Aug 2007

Forster is about a four hour drive from Sydney. Went on a very brief overnight camping/fishing trip with my good friends from Sydney University, Warren and Chris. All the images from this trip can be seen here

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Went straight to our spot on the rocks at Seven Mile Beach.

It wasn't long before Warren caught the first tailor (note that hat, you have to be very self-confident to be seen in public in a hat like that).

Others soon followed.

After cleaning our fish in the dark (speed was more important than accuracy in this case), it was over to the National Park where we could cook and pitch our tent in absolute darkness. It was a beautiful moonless night, the type that makes you feel very small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We could see so many stars that some regions looked like clusters of clouds.

The next morning was cold but there was a perfect mirror on the water beside which we camped.

Made breakfast.

Got some cunji for bait.

and fished at the breakwall.

In the evening, we fished the rocks again. This time I used cunji and pilchard pieces. Got a blackfish (also called luderick) on my first cast.

Here is Chris with a tailor.

We also caught some bream

and here is the largest tailor we got, caught on a small spinning rod with 3kg line. The tailor jumped about 4 times and took about 10 min to land.

Ended up with a nice mixed bag, we released some of the fish but also kept some for the table.

Overall, had a great fishing trip with good friends. Life doesn't get any better.

Finland Pike Fishing June 2007

Pike Fishing (Finland June 2007)

To see pictures not in this article, click here.

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My trip to Finland coincided with the Midsummer Festival, an event which I was lucky enough to share with my host Tero.

The Festival coincides with the summer solstice, a time when the sun doesn't set. It doesn't rise in the east either, but rather does a little circle in the north. After a few days, I had completely lost track of time. In one case, I though was the afternoon whereas it was actually 10pm.

Tero is a fishing fanatic and I was dragged to fly-fish for trout.

It was hot and we only fished for a few hours in the middle of the day. Didn’t get any trout, but I caught this whopper on fly.

It is traditional for Finns to light a bonfire on the Midsummer Festival and stay up all night drinking beer. Ours was started using petrol and although it was close to zero celcius, we couldn’t stand anywhere near it.

The photo below was taken at 1:30am.

At about 3am, we decided to go fishing using a funny contraption that is towed parallel to the boat. Several lures are attached (4 actually) and you around until a fish takes.

Caught a pike using this method. Then they decided to head to an island for a walk.

That was the end of a long day.

Day 2

The next day we did a little more pike fishing.

After which we cooked them while we were cooking ourselves in the sauna.

I checked the fish trap and we had a great catch.

Then, back to fishing.

Here I am demonstrating how to walk on water.

Day 3

We started the day by retrieving nets we had previously set. I always thought that nets would be a really efficient way to catch fish. What I didn't realize is that untangling them was such a big job. There was one fish that took us about an hour to get out of the net. We ended up cutting it out without damaging the net, a job which required two people and I'm sure which is more difficult than performing a liver transplant.

Then we went fishing.

This time we used GPS and marked all the places we caught fish with little aeroplane symbols. We could then troll back across productive areas.

Of course, the best part about fishing is that you can eat the fruits of your labour.

That evening, we tried unsuccessfully to catch a pike on fly.

Day 4

By the final day, we had caught lots of fish. Tero had a conference call and I was left to my own devices, a potentially dangerous situation. Decided to go fly fishing and within 10 minutes, this little pike scoffed my fly, probably the first fly-caught pike from Tero’s lake.

A few minutes later, I was trying to reposition the boat and noticed my fly line moving off to the side. Fly must have accidentally dropped out and the pike took it right next to the boat. Here is that unlucky fish (not my best picture but it’s difficult to take a self-portrait while juggling a live fish).

Tero put on his lucky jumper and soon caught his own.

All in all, we had a great time fishing. We caught lots of fish, mainly pike but also perch, flatfish, pike-perch (zander) and sarki. I like pike, they are the ultimate predator with lightening speed, sharp teeth and the personality of a psychotic stepmother. You can often see them shoot out from the reeds and take your fly or lure. When they hit, there is no mistaking it. I look forward to catching a large one some day, they can grow to more than 40lb.

Here is the successful fly and some of the lures that we used.

HK Panorama

Here is a photo of HK's skyline.

Photographs

Here is an aerial photograph of Hong Kong I took in 2004. For other photos, see here.

Congratulations to Gary Chun Tak Chow (Croucher Scholarship)

Congratulations to Mr. Gary Chow Chun Tak, my joint M.Phil student with Prof Wen Li, who was awarded a Croucher Scholarship (http://www.croucher.org.hk/scholar1.htm). He will do his Ph.D study at Imperial College, UK. His thesis is on the "Design and Analysis of Single Chip CNTs Sensor".

Engineering Concert

Here are some pictures that Profs K.H. Lee, K.H. Wong and I took at this year's Engineering Concert.

JAlbum

JAlbum is an excellent program to create a gallery from a directory of photos. A few of my photos are here.

Biography

Philip Leong (M'84-SM'02) received the B.Sc., B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Sydney in 1986, 1988 and 1993 respectively. In 1993 he was a consultant to ST Microelectronics in Milan, Italy working on advanced flash memory-based integrated circuit design. From 1994-1997, he was a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Since 1997, he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he is a Professor and the director of the Custom Computing Laboratory. Dr Leong is also Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London and the Chief Technology Advisor to Cluster Technology. He was program co-chair of the FPT and FPL conferences and is an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. The author of more than 100 technical papers and 4 patents, Dr. Leong was the recipient of the 2005 FPT conference best paper and 2007 FPL conference Stamatis Vassiliadis outstanding paper awards. His research interests include reconfigurable computing, signal processing, computer architecture, computer arithmetic and biologically inspired computing.

FPGA Conference Monterey

Here is a photo from the Monterey Beach Resort where the ACM International Symposium on FPGAs Conference was held.