Dr Ming Jiang

Undergraduate (BSc):

• Software Engineering
• Software Enterprise
• Product Development

Postgraduate (MSc):

• Data Science Product Development
• Foundations of Computer Science
• MSc Computing Project
  
  

• Cloud computing
  
• Big data analysis and visualisation
• Intelligent robots
  
• Gamification for e-learning

Recent projects:

2024:

Academic support to various digital and engineering projects of the Arrow Innovation Business and Partnerships led by Research and Innovation at Sunderland.

2023: Augmented Reality-based Interactive Data Visualisation for Building Energy Consumption Analysis

Amira Al Zadjali, Ming Jiang

This MSc Applied Data Science Placement Project explored an augmented reality-based interactive data visualisation approach to analysing building energy consumption data as a more effective integration of computational analysis and human-in-the-loop interactive pattern recognition. The novel augmented reality-based interactions during data visualisation process can facilitate better decision-making and energy consumption behavior changes by affecting human perception, cognition, and reasoning with the insights of data and informative digital interfaces.

Earlier projects:

Projects at the Industry 4.0 Lab and Immersive Technology Lab

With the newly established Industry 4.0 Lab and Immersive Technology Lab at FoT in 2021/2 academic year, I am actively supporting PhD students and colleagues in the School of Engineering to develop the Smart Factories module and Industry 4.0 projects with my research experience in discrete event system modelling and simulation, IoT, and virtual reality technologies.

A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach for Customer Loyalty Prediction

H. F. Lee, Ming Jiang

Customer loyalty prediction is one of the most common applications of machine learning in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Many research studies have tried to compare the effectiveness of different machine-learning techniques applied for model development. Also due to the simplicity and effectiveness, customer purchase behavioral attributes, such as, Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value (RFM) are commonly used for predicting the customer lifetime value as a measure of loyalty.

However, since RFM focuses on the purchase behaviours of customers only, it often overlooks the effect of other important factors to loyalty such as customer satisfaction and product experience. In this paper, a two-stage hybrid machine-learning approach is designed to address this. Firstly, both unsupervised clustering and supervised classification models are used in the predication model building to realise the possible incremental value of hybrid model combining two learning techniques. Secondly, the proposed model is trained with behavourial RFM attributes and attitudinal factors such as customer satisfaction and product attributes, to better capture the influencing factors to loyalty. Full paper link.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) Enhanced with Imitation Learning Strategy for Intelligent Non-Playable Character (NPC) Design in Virtual Reality Video Game

In this project, Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhanced with an imitation learning strategy is developed to train an intelligent Non-Playable Character (NPC) agent (ie Rolling Ball) to chase after a randomly placed target (ie Cube) on a surface within its four boundaries. The RL approach enhanced with imitation learning strategy and the intelligent agent training system developed with Unity and Windows Mixed Reality platform can be extended and applied to a range of challenging and exciting scenarios of intelligent Virtual Reality game design and development or gamifications. Project Demo.

An Augmented Reality Demonstration Platform of the University of Sunderland One Campus Masterplan

Ming Jiang (University of Sunderland); Dorian Morax (University of Bordeaux).

The project designed and developed a portable Augmented Reality technology based immersive and interactive demonstration platform of the One Campus Masterplan of University of Sunderland to illustrate some of the key visionary concepts, such as the Campus Landscaping, and other major landmarks/sceneries on the One Campus envisaged by the Masterplan, which develops a single unified campus connecting the current City Campus to the South and Sir Tom Cowie Campus at Saint Peter’s to the North in the City of Sunderland. Project Demo.

A New Storytelling of Sistine Chapel Ceiling Frescoes in Mixed Reality

Ming Jiang (University of Sunderland); Gabriel Benit and Nicolas Deguillaume (University of Bordeaux).

The project developed an immersive and interactive Mixed Reality Sistine Chapel e-Learning Platform, on which the Renaissance genius Michelangelo’s sacred representations of humanity are demystified and appreciated with 21st-century cutting-edge digital technology. Project Demo.

Humanoid Robot as an e-Learning Companion

James Hennerley, Matthew Dickinson, and Ming Jiang, Augmented Reality Enhanced Human Robot Interaction for Social Robots as e-Learning Companions, Proceedings of the 31st International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2017), University of Sunderland, Sir Tom Cowie Campus at St Peter’s, Sunderland, UK, 3 - 6 July 2017, HCI 2017 Digital make-believe. 

A demo of developing social robots.

I am passionate about data-centric knowledge discovery and digital innovations for solving challenging and interesting real-life problems:

• Distributed and scalable machine learning/data mining algorithms and services
• Intelligent and affective human-robot interactions
• QoS (eg risk, trust, and security) modelling and assessments in Cloud/Grid infrastructures (IaaS) and services (SaaS)

• Program Committee Member of the Ninth International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Heraklion, Greece, 2–4 May, 2019
• Program Committee Member of the Eighth International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Funchal, Portugal, 19–21 March, 2018
• Program Committee Member of the British HCI Conference, Sunderland, UK, 3–6 July, 2017
• Program Committee Member of the Seventh International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Porto, Portugal, 24–26 April, 2017
• International Program Committee Member of the INNS Conference on Big Data (INNSBIGDATA 2016), Thessaloniki, Greece, 23–25 October 2016
• Program Committee Member of the Sixth International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Rome, Italy, 23–25 April, 2016
• Program Committee Member of the Fifth International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Lisbon, Portugal, 20–22 May, 2015
• Program Committee Member of the Fourth International Conference of Cloud Computing and Services Science, Barcelona, Spain, 3–5 April, 2014
• Technical Program Committee Member of Cloud Computing 2013: The Fourth International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization, Valencia, Spain, May 27–June 1, 2013
• Technical Program Committee Member of Cloud Computing 2012: The Third International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization, Nice, France 22–27 July 2012