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Dr Minhua Eunice Ma

Fact File

Job title: Reader in Visualisation and Virtual Reality, Programme Leader for MSc Computer Games Production
Email: m.ma@derby.ac.uk
Phone No: 01332 592108
Room: E514, Kedleston Road
I'm a media friendly expert

I'm a media friendly expert

Faculty: Business, Computing and Law

School: School of Computing

Subject Area: Computing and IT


PhD Supervision

1. Pianhui Wu at University of Derby, "Digital Image Watermarking Technology Based on Scrambling Transformation and Chaotic Encryption", expected completion Dec 2011.

2. Tendai Dube at University of Derby, "A Flexible E-learning System Inspired by Design Methodology Management", expected completion Dec 2011.

3. Racious Moatshe at University of Derby, "E-Business and E-Government Implementations for Botswana Government", expect completion Oct 2012.

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD and want to investigate potential supervision of your project within an area that matches up with my research areas, please contact me via email.

Teaching responsibilities

  • Advanced games studies, Level 7
  • Studing at Masters Level & Research Methods, Level 7
  • Professional Practice in the Games Industry, Level 6
  • Real-time rendering, Level 5
  • Interactive 3D graphics programming, Level 5
  • Multi-user Internet databases, Level 5
  • Applied game art development, Level 5
  • Introduction to 3D modelling, Level 4
  • Introduction to databases, Level 4
  • Game design, Level 4

Professional interests

Scholarships and Awards

  • 2009 Award for Excellence 2009 (Promising Researcher) by University of Derby, in recognition of contribution in research.  
  • 2004 The paper Visual semantics and ontology of eventive verbs achieved the best paper award in the First International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-04), Sanya, China
  • 2004 The award of best final-year Ph.D. student presentation in Faculty Research Conference by Research Graduate School, University of Ulster
  • 2003 John Wiley & Sons Award of Best Ph.D. Confirmation Report by Research Graduate School, University of Ulster
  • 2001 Magee Research Award - Intelligent Digital Multimedia Systems Scholarship by University of Ulster for a 3-year PhD research program
  • 2000 International Scholarship for Postgraduates from University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  • 1998 The Articulation Database of Comparison between Normal Persons and Cleft Lip & Palate Patients after Operation won Shanghai Young Researcher Project Award

Research interests

  • Digital games, serious games
  • Virtual reality, augmented reality
  • 3D animation, physically-based simulation, automatic 3D animation generation
  • Visualisation, natural language visualisation, forensic visualisation
  • Intelligent Multimedia, HCI (Human Computer Interface), Autonomous Intelligent Agents
  • AI, Natural Language Processing, Computational Semantics

Research Projects

  • 3D Visualisation of Crime Scenes: Computer Animation in Forensics
    Period: Jan 2008 - Dec 2008
    Funded by: Research Inspired Curriculum Fund, University of Derby
  • Virtual Reality and upper limb rehabilitation following stroke
    Period: August 2004 - August 2007
    Funded by: the Northern Ireland Chest Heart and Stroke Association
    Partners: School of Computing & Information Engineering with Health & Rehabilitation Research Institute, University of Ulster
  • Rehabilitation Potential of Digital Games, HEIF8 cross-faculty interdisciplinary project
    Period: July 2006 - December 2006
    Funded by: University of Ulster
    Partners: School of Computing & Information Engineering with Health & Rehabilitation Research Institute, University of Ulster
  • PhD project: Automatic Conversion of Natural Language to 3D Animation
    Period: September 2001 - August 2005
    Funded by: Magee Research Award
  • MSc project: Searching TV programs using teletext subtitles
    Period: May 2001 - September 2001
    Partially funded by International Scholarship for Postgraduates from University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  • AI and Role-playing game project
    Period: 2001
  • User Interface design for DPTV OSD
    Industry project: Trident Multimedia Technologies Co., LTD.
    Period: 1999
  • MA project, The Phonetics Features and Prosodic Structure of the Stress Matrix in Mandarin
    Period: September 1995 - August 1998
    Funded by: Chinese National 95 Philosophy and Social Science Project Grant, under 'Computational Processing of the Speech of Mandarin'
    Partners: the Linguistics Institute, Shanghai Normal University with the Speech Synthesis Group, Microsoft Research Beijing Lab
  • Articulation Database of Comparison between Normal Persons and Cleft Lip and Palate Patients after Operation
    Period: September 1996 - January 1998
    Partners: the Linguistics Institute, Shanghai Normal University with the Department of Cleft Lip, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital
    This project won the Shanghai Young Researcher Project Award 1998
  • TDP (Tools for Dialectology and Phonology)
    Period: September 1995 - April 1997
    Funded by: Association of Chinese Dialectology

Membership of professional bodies and advisory committees

  • Member of Subject Research Ethics Committee for the School of Computing, University of Derby (since 2009)
  • Member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), joined 2005
  • Member of European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), joined 2004
  • Member of Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland (AIAI), joined 2004
  • Member of the National Linguistic Society of China, joined 1995

Recent Publications

    Book chapters and Journal papers
    - Ma, Minhua, H. Zheng, and H. Lallie (2010) Virtual Reality and 3D Animation in Forensic Visualisation. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 55(5), September 2010, Wiley-Blackwell. (Scheduled for publishing)
    - Ma, Minhua, J. Zhang, and N. Antonopoulos (2009) Middleware for Next-generation Network Games. International Journal of Intelligent Information Technology Application, 2(4):158-163, August 2009, Engineering Technology Press.
    - Ma, Minhua, M. McNeill, D. Charles, S. McDonough, J. Crosbie, L. Oliver, and C. McGoldrick (2007) Adaptive Virtual Reality Games for Rehabilitation of Motor Disorders. Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. C. Stephanidis (Ed.): Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, Part II, HCII 2007, LNCS 4555, 681-690, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2006) Virtual Human Animation in Natural Language Visualisation. Special Issue on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence Review (25): 37-53, Creaney, N. (Ed.), Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2004) Interval relations in visual semantics of verbs. Special Issue on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence Review (21): 293-316, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2004) Visual semantics and ontology of eventive verbs. In Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series--Natural Language Processing, LNCS 3248.  Keh-Yih Su, et al. (Eds.), 187-196, Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. Expanded from the IJCNLP-04 conference paper.
    - Ma, Minhua (1999) The relationship among fundamental frequency, f1, f2, and energy of vowel. In Journal of Shanghai Normal University (28):205-209 (ISSN: 1004-8634).
    - Ma, Minhua (Translate) (1999) The Hsiungnu Language (book chapter). In the Chinese version of The Consonant System of Old Chinese (E.G. Pwlleyblank), W. Pan (Translate), 163-201, Beijing, China: Chinese Press. (ISBN: 7-101-02225-1)
    - Ma, Minhua (1998) Computational linguistics (book chapter). In New Methods in Dialectology, W. Pan (Ed.), 192-218, Shanghai, China: Shanghai Education Press.
    - Ma, Minhua (Translate) (1997) Shift Chains in System. In Chinese version of Principles of Linguistic Change (W. Labov 1994), W. Pan (Ed.), Shanghai, China: Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
    Peer-reviewed conference papers
    - Oikonomou, A. and Minhua Ma (2009) Assessing Presentations in Game Development Education: Guidelines and Marking Criteria. In the 17th International Conference on Learning, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, 6-9 July 2010. (Accepted)
    - Ma, Minhua, A. Oikonomou, and H. Zheng (2009) Second Life as a Learning and Teaching Environment for Digital Games Education. In the Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Workshop on Presence (PRESENCE 2009), Los Angeles, California, USA, 11-13 November 2009. (In press)
    - Dube, T. and Minhua Ma (2009) Flexible E-Assessment for Accommodating Diverse Learning Styles. In the Proceedings of London International Conference on Education (LICE-2009), Shoniregun, C. and Akmayeva, G. (Eds.), 360-363, London, UK, 9-12 November 2009. (ISBN: 978-0-9564263-0-7)
    - Dube, T., Zhao, Z., and Ma, Minhua (2009) E-assessment and Design Methodology Management. In the Proceedings of E-Assessment Live Conference 2009, Loughborough University, UK, 8 July 2009.
    - Ma, Minhua and K. Bechkoum (2008) Serious Games for Movement Therapy after Stroke. In IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE SMC 2008), D. S. Yeung, A. N. Poo, and M. H. Ang Jr (Eds.), 1872-1877, Singapore, 12-15 October. (ISBN: 978-1-4244-2384-2)
    - Ma, Minhua, M. McNeill, D. Charles, S. McDonough, and J. Crosbie (2006) Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation. In the Proceedings of  the IEEE 9th International Conference on Computer Games: AI, Animation, Mobile, Educational & Serious Games (CGames06), Q. Mehdi, F. Mtenzi, B. Duggan, and H McAtamney (Eds.), 143-150, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland, 22-24 November. (ISBN: 0-9549016-2-2)
    - Ma, Minhua, M. McNeill, D. Charles, S. McDonough, and J. Crosbie (2006) Physics-based Virtual Reality for Post-stroke Rehabilitation. In the Proceedings of  the Eurographics Ireland 2006 Workshop, C. Noonan (Ed), Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, 31 October 2006.
    - Ma, Minhua, M. McNeill, S. McDonough, J. Crosbie, and L. Oliver (2006) Physics Fidelity of Virtual Reality in Motor Rehabilitation. In Virtual: a Real Success: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Virtual Reality (VRIC—Laval Virtual 2006), S. Richir and E. Klinger (Eds.), 35-41, Laval, France, 26-30 April 2006.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2005) Presenting Temporal Relations of Virtual Human Actions by Multiple Animation Channels. In the Proceedings of the 16th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Science (AICS-05), N. Creaney (Ed.), 169-178, Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, 7-9 September.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2005) Lexical Semantics and Auditory Display in Virtual Storytelling. In the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display 2005 (ICAD05), E. Brazil (Ed.), 358-363, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 6-9 July.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2005) Animating Virtual Humans in Intelligent Multimedia Storytelling. In the Proceedings of the 6th Annual PGNET Conference: The convergence of telecommunications, networking and broadcasting (PGNET 2005), M. Merabti and R. Pereira (Eds.), 159-164, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, England, June.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2004) Using lexical knowledge of verbs in language-to-vision applications. In the Proceedings of the 15th Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference (AICS-04), L. McGinty and B. Crean (Eds.), 255-264, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Castlebar, Ireland, September.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2004) Visual semantics and ontology of eventive verbs. In the  Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-04), Keh-Yih Su and Jun-Ichi Tsujii (Eds.), 278-285, Resort Golden Palm, Sanya, China, 22-24 March 2004, awarded one of best 3 IJCNLP papers.
    - Ma, Minhua and Paul Mc Kevitt (2003) Temporal relations in visual semantics of verbs, In the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-03), Padraig Cunningham, Tim Fernando, Carl Vogel (Eds.), 128-133, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 17-19 September 2003.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2003) Building character animation for intelligent storytelling with the H-Anim standard. In Eurographics Ireland Chapter Workshop Proceedings 2003, M. McNeill (Ed.), 9-15, Coleraine, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, April.
    - Ma, Minhua and P. McKevitt (2003) Semantic representation of events in 3D animation. In the Proceedings of The Fifth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-5), H. Bunt, I. van der Sluis and R. Morante (Eds.), 253-281, Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 2003.
    - Ma, Minhua (1997) TDP: A research Toolkit for Dialectology and Phonology. In the Proceedings of Association of Chinese Dialectology 1997, 249-255, Fuzhou, China, August 1997.
    Theses
    - Ma, Minhua (2006) Automatic Conversion of Natural Language to 3D Animation. Ph.D. thesis, School of Computing & Intelligent Systems, University of Ulster, Derry, N. Ireland.
    - Ma, Minhua (2001) Searching TV programs using teletext subtitles. M.Sc. thesis, School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.
    - Ma, Minhua (1998) The Phonetics Features and Prosodic Structure of the Stress Patterns in Mandarin. M.A. thesis, Linguistics Institute, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
    Other
    - Ma, Minhua (2008) 3D Visualisation of Crime Scenes: Computer Animation in Forensics. In 3rd Annual Teaching & Assessment Conference: Flexibity, current and future practice, University of Derby, Buxton, 10 July 2008.

    Additional Interests and Activities

    Professional Activities

    • Editor of Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology (since June 2009)
    • Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Scientific Journals International (SJI) (since 2006) http://www.scientificjournals.org/editorial_board.htm
    • Member of the Editorial Committee for Computational Linguistics, Foxwell & Davies Ltd Scientific Publisher (since 2003)
    • Reviewer for ACM Computing Reviews (since Jan 2009)
    • Regular reviewer for the International Journal of Automation and Computing (since 2008)
    • Reviewer for the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (2008, 2009)
    • Reviewer for the journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior (since 2007)
    • Reviewing LPA Prolog and WordNet for Logic Programming Associates (LPA) (Aug 2004)
    • Regular reviewer for the journal of Artificial Intelligence Review, Springer Netherlands (since 2003)

    Latest news

    Public Understanding of Science—Media Reports

    Undergraduate qualifications

    • BA Language and Literature, Date of award: July 1995, Shanghai Normal University

    Postgraduate qualifications

    • MA Experimental Phonetics and Phonology, Date of award: July 1998, Shanghai Normal University
    • MSc Computer Science, Date of award: December 2001, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

    Research qualifications

    • PhD Computer Science, Date of award: November 2006, University of Ulster

    Research posts

    InstitutionProjectDates
    University of UlsterVirtual Reality Games and Upper Limb Rehabilitation Following StrokeJuly 2005 - August 2007

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