UNIVERSITI Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) academic Prof Dr Lim Eng Hock (pic) is the proud recipient of the AIM Ted Williams Award Year 2022. Prof Lim, from the varsity’s Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science (LKC FES), is the first Malaysian to receive the prestigious international award established by the Pennsylvania-based Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility.
The award, presented during an online ceremony on Dec 8, was a recognition of his contributions to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the varsity’s press release read.
Named in honour of Ted Williams, an industry innovator, collaborator, and long-time member of the AIM Global Technical Symbology Committee, the award was introduced in 2007 and is presented annually to a professor or student in recognition of their innovative and exceptional contributions to the development of the automatic identification and mobility industry that can further the growth of the industry through their work as a teacher, researcher and entrepreneur.
Prof Lim enthused, “This honour is the collective efforts of my research team. Thank you to my research team, UTAR, and funders for being supportive throughout my research journey, especially in the fields of antenna design and RFID technology.”
He also expressed his appreciation to the Collaborative Research in Engineering, Science and Technology Centre (Crest) and NanoMalaysia Berhad for providing research funds and enabling the establishment of a fruitful university-industry collaboration platform.
Through the platform, Prof Lim has been actively assisting local and multinational industries to strengthen their research and development capabilities while commercialising his research outputs.An expert in RFID antenna design, Prof Lim has published many impactful technical papers on RFID, mostly in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, which is the most prestigious peer-reviewed international journal in this discipline.
He has also proposed many novel design methods for optimising the performances of various metal-mountable tags.
Most of the metal-mountable RFID tag antennas in the commercial market now are only able to achieve a read distance of less than three metres. Prof Lim has innovated new design techniques that enable the tags’ readability to go beyond 10 metres.
Due to his outstanding academic performance, he was the first Malaysian to be invited to serve as the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.
Elected distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Council on RFID (International) in April last year, he currently sits on the editorial boards of the IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification and Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM) Science Journal.
Prof Lim is also a fellow of the ASM and the Asean Academy of Engineering and Technology.
Separately, his colleague and LKC FES academic Prof Dr Yau Kok Lim received the Best Paper Award at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Control System, Computing and Engineering (ICCSCE) 2022, which was held virtually on Oct 22.
The ICCSCE 2022 was organised by the IEEE and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) Penang to provide an open forum for researchers, engineers, network planners and service providers involved in emerging algorithms, systems, standards, services and applications.
The conference was also aimed at bringing together leading international players in control systems, computing and engineering to share their original and fundamental research and engineering findings.
Of the 40 papers accepted at the international conference, Prof Yau’s research titled “Towards Latency Aware Multi-joint Optimization Method for VNF Placement and SFC Routing via Swarm Intelligence” was selected for the award.
His research, which aims to solve the joint optimisation of virtual network function (VNF) with VNF placement and service function chain routing while achieving the latency requirements of 5G networks, was co-authored with Sunway University academics Angela Amphawan, Muhammad Basheer Jasser and Zahida Sharif.
