UTP Computer Engineering student publishes paper with Massachusetts Institute of Technology

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 29  -- A Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) computer engineering student created history after he successfully published a conference paper at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE).

Muhammad Fathy Rashad, a UTP undergraduate student, in a statement said his paper titled CreativeGAN: Editing Generative Adversarial Networks for Creative Design Synthesis was published together with Assistant Professor Faez Ahmed and Amin Heyrani Nobari, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Muhammad Fathy said that the paper was aimed at introducing a method to enhance the creative capability of generative machine learning models which was used to generate new data such as images, music, product designs, or even arts and paintings, hence, showing a certain degree of computational creativity.

“However, generating a truly novel or unique design using machine learning still remains a challenge. Our paper attempts to enhance the creative capability of machine learning models by identifying components that make a design unique and modifying the generative model to generate designs with unique components. 

“The paper demonstrates this method by generating new bicycle designs with unique frames and handle,” he said.

Muhammad Fathy also recalled how he was able to get connected with MIT when he was doing the internship at Vitrox Corporation Bhd, an automated electronics inspection company, and just started learning about machine learning. 

“I started to blog on what I learned and published several articles about machine learning. Coincidentally, one of my articles overlapped with one of the MIT DeCoDE Lab’s research interests which is computational creativity.

“Faez read my article and then sent me an email for a talk and gave me some preliminary tasks. As he saw the potential for a conference paper, he paired me up with one of his PhD students, Amin Heyrani and we started working together on the research,” he said.

Muhammad Fathy said being affiliated with MIT is something that he would never expect and the experience has taught him many lessons such as how to write a conference paper, how to conduct research and how to present research better.

Apart from publishing the conference paper with MIT, Muhammad Fathy also had the opportunity to become one of the members and the only non-MIT student at the DeCoDE Lab.

Muhammad Fathy also pointed out he never thought that he would be able to publish and present a paper at the age of 20 and conduct research at the international level.

He also said that his education and extracurricular activities at UTP had helped him nurture public speaking and academic writing skills which were extremely helpful when writing the conference paper.

“Additionally, UTP’s seven-month-long student industrial internship programme had greatly helped me to learn machine learning in-depth and gave me my initial experience on research. Without these skills and research experience, I may have not been able to get the same opportunity to do research with MIT,” he said.

He expressed gratitude to his supervisor, Dr Ho Tatt Wei, and his lecturers for being supportive and understanding in allowing him to focus on completing his conference paper, as it was difficult balancing research work and studies due to the time difference.

Meanwhile, UTP Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor Ir Dr Hilmi Mukhtar said UTP was extremely proud of Muhammad Fathy’s achievement which he described as a testimonial of the quality of students that the university has produced all-round excellent students who are top-notch, creative and innovative, that set them apart from others.

-- BERNAMA