Professor Yam, Yeung

Biography

YAM Yeung is a Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His general research interests include dynamics modeling and control, fuzzy approximation, human skill acquisition and automation systems. He is the Director of the Intelligent Control Systems Laboratory (LCSL), and also the Director of the CUHK-Beijing Institute of Technology Joint Research Center for Optomechatronics Design and Engineering (JRCODE). He and his team have engaged in a number of ITC-sponsored projects in advanced optical manufacturing in recent years. He is the General Chair of the International Symposium on Optomectatronic Technologies to be held in Hong Kong on November 1-3, 2011. He also served for many years as a member of the Judging Panel for the Hong Kong Award for Industry in the Machinery and Equipment Design category. YAM Yeung received his bachelor degree in Physics from CUHK, and his M.Sc. and Sc.D. degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before returning to teach at CUHK, he was a member of the Technical Staff in the Control Analysis Research Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA. He has published over 150 technical papers in his areas of interest.  

Research Interest

Major on-going projects are: Robotic platform for Chinese calligraphy and painting: The platform offers six degrees-of-freedom for a brush-pen and is capable of automatic stroke segmentation, brush-stroke command generation and iterative vision-based self-correction. A novel approach to model the soft, physical deformations of the brush-pen is incorporated. "Learning-by-observation" through a motion recording system that captures expert calligraphers at work is also studied. Videos of the platform can be found in the following website: http://www2.mae.cuhk.edu.hk/~icsl/drawingRobotVideo.htm. Tensor-Product (TP)-based Computational Design Approach: Formulation of a novel design methodology to numerically convert parameter-varying system into Tensor Product canonical form for LMI-based control system design. The approach also offers a new perspective of control system design. Instead to relying solely on the formulation of more effective LMIs, which is the widely adopted approach in existing LMI-related studies, it calls for a systematic modification and reshaping of the polytopic convex hull to facilitate feasible designs. Fuzzy Inference Mappings: Development of a new perspective to an important class of fuzzy control and inference problems by casting fuzzy rules as mappings between antecedent and consequent spaces. The approach includes mapping fuzzy rules with piecewise linear membership functions into Cartesian spaces, as well as fuzzy rules with continuous membership functions mapped into spaces of square, integrable functions. The formulation allows fuzzy interpolation and extrapolation problems for both full and sparse rule bases to be tackled using the inner products defined in the respective spaces. Optical Element Design and Fabrication: Design and construction of magnetorheological fluid-based machine for polishing of optical elements. Incorporation of intelligent and novel techniques to facilitate iterative polishing process and interferometric monitoring of the quality of the eventual product. Modeling of Biological Systems: Development of new mathematical model to explain the Hodgkin and Huxley (HH) experiment data on giant squid axons. The new model is based on kinetic deformation theory, and produces enhanced physical meaning than the original HH model. Moreover, the new model is able to qualitatively explain the Cole-Moor shift, which could not be accounted for by the HH model and other related ones.