Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1999

Two More Patents for CUHK Inventions The University has successfully applied for the US Patent for the following inventions, the sixth and seventh it has been grante d to date: • Polymerase Chain Reaction 一 Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Test for the Authentication of Traditional Chinese Medicines Inventors: Prof. Jun Wan g (Department of Biochemistry), et al. This invention provides a procedure for authenticating plant and animal materials used as traditional Chinese medicine. It offers a reliable and definite way to identify morphologically similar Chinese medicines, using a minute amount of biological samples. • Context-based, Adaptive Lossless Image Codec (CALIC) Inventors: Prof. Wu Xiao Lin (former staff, Department of Information Engineering), et al. The rapid growth of image data imposes burdens on computer storage and visual communication bandwidth. Thus image compression becomes a pressing technical challenge in visual communications and computing. This invention is a practical, high-performance, universal coding system called CALIC, for lossless compression of digital pictures of all types. An image is encoded i n a compact form for storage and transmission and can be decoded without any loss of Research News HK$19 million Research Grants for 33 Projects Research grants totalling some HK$19 million from various local and overseas sponsors for CUHK projects were recorded during the period October 1998 to May 1999: S p o n s o r s A m o u n t I n v o l v e d N u m b e r of P r o j e c t s Research Grants Council (Central Allocation) HK$7,700,000 3 UK-Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme £50,719.57 9 Health Services Research Committee HK$5,277,523 9 New Zealand Dairy Board HK$3,800,000 1 Occupational Safety and Health Council HK$566,208 I Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health HK$805,230 1 Germany/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme HK$238,674 9