| Universiti Putra Malaysia

Dr. Syed Abdul Rahman wins gold at world innovation expo in Belgium


By:  Azman Zakaria
Photo: Noor Azreen Awang

SERDANG, April 5 - Assoc. Prof Dr Syed Abdul Rahman Al-Haddad Syed Mohamed, a lecturer and researcher at the Engineering Faculty’s Computer and Communication Systems Engineering,Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), won a gold medal at “The World Exhibition on Inventions, Research and New Technologies” exhibition in Brussels, Belgium.

His victory was achieved through an innovative invention “GULAGA - Second Screen Video Information via Mobile Digital Video Identification.”

A total of 192 products from 20 countries participated in the exhibition which took place from November 19 to November 21, 2015.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Syed Abdul Rahman said it ‘Gulaga’ is the action by general users where they scan the video played for trending information on the social media related to the video they watch.

“For this additional purposes, a video is featured with watermark safety characteristics embedded in the audio signal. This technology is at the core of future TV where people will download their channel via App on their SmartTV.

“This technology will be incorporated into the app for easy scanning of the content they watch, with trending information on the social media,” he said in an interview.

He added that together with fellow researcher, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Abdul Rahman Ramli and a doctorate (PhD) student, Mohamad Ali Nematollahi, they succeeded in inventing an algorithm that could detect suitable frames to be embedded into the data for watermarking.

Gulaga application is embedded in mobile phones to benefit from the present trend where mobile phones are regarded as a necessity and used by everyone, said Assoc. Prof. Dr. Syed Abdul Rahman.

According to him, when the application is used, for instance while one is watching a video, information about the movie or segment will be screened on the video.

He also said that the feature was more of a watermark security as it is more of a code keeping in the video. Only individuals who have registered are able to open the application that could read the watermark.

“This is something long awaited for due to piracy in the market where people can easily duplicate or copy the works or inventions of others. These watermark safety features can overcome this problem,” he said.

Having won the gold medal and a certificate at the exhibition, he expressed gratitude for the achievement which he said would indirectly help promote UPM and UPM products at international level.

“Definitely we will be disappointed if we do not win anything in a competition but when you win, we must be grateful,” he said, adding that Gulaga was named after “Google.”

“If someone wants to search for a word, normally what they say is “let’s google.” In this case, if we want to search for a video, we can always say “let’s Gulaga”, a video search which is based on the voice we hear,” he said. – UPM.


SXDdSA4~