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Dr. Terence Sim

Associate Professor, School of Computing,
Vice Dean, Office of Admissions,
Director, NUS Computing Gallery
National University of Singapore

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About Dr. Terence Sim

Explain. Demonstrate. Experiment. Inspire.

The above sums up my teaching and research philosophy. Over the years, I had the pleasure of teaching many courses - Introductory Programming, Computer Vision, Visual Effects, Multimedia - and interacting with many talented students. I'm currently teaching Discrete Structures, and Biometrics Authentication.
For research, I explore several areas related to Visual Computing: Facial image analysis, Multimodal biometrics, Facial rendering, Computational photography, Continuous authentication, Music transcription, to name a few. I combine machine learning with physics-based modeling and graphics rendering to tackle the challenges in research.
I also provide consultancy in biometrics.

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Selected Research

Home: CV
Shakespeer

Shakespeer: Bone Biometrics

ICPR, August 2022

Gucheng Wang, Jay Prakash, Terence Sim, Jun Han

Securely and unobtrusively authenticating a user is an important problem given the pervasiveness of smartphones. Existing approaches, such as password, fingerprints, or facial recognition, are vulnerable to various attacks, and/or degrade usability. To overcome this problem, we propose Shakespeer, which differentiates users based on uniqueness in the propagation of haptic vibrations through hand, forearm muscles and bones. These vibrations are generated by the user’s smartphone and sensed by their smartphone and smartwatch. The unobtrusive haptic vibrational response makes this biometric feature hard to be replicated. Meanwhile, it provides the co-presence detection function, which allows the devices to confirm the co-presence on the user’s body.

earwalk_edited.jpg

EarWalk: Foot Posture from your earbuds

Hotmobile, March 2022

Nan Jiang, Terence Sim, Jun Han

Stress on the knee --- caused by various factors including injuries, aging, and overweight --- is a major contributor to orthopedic disorders such as knee osteoarthritis (OA), a severe illness that can even lead to decreased ability to walk. One possible treatment for this problem is to have patients conduct gait modification, getting them to intentionally walk toe-in or toe-out, thereby reducing the stress on their knees. In this paper, we propose EarWalk, a novel solution that utilizes commodity wireless earables to provide constant and real-time feedback on the patients' gait modification. EarWalk leverages the built-in accelerometer in earables to sense and ultimately differentiate normal, toe-in, and toe-out gait postures due to the minute differences in their vibrations.

ContinuousGait_edited.jpg

Action-Invariant Gait

IJCB, October 2022

Sanka Rasnayaka, Terence Sim

Continuous Authentication (CA) is proposed as an alter-native authentication scheme for modern personal devices. Gait is a suitable biometric for CA due to its availability and low resource requirements. However, the drastic change in the gait pattern with changes in actions (such as walking, running or climbing stairs) and changes in terrain (such as walking on a flat surface or down an incline) makes it chal-lenging to deploy in a real-world CA system. We show that standard gait features are influenced by different actions. The gait pattern of an action is also in-fluenced by the actions performed before and immediately after. Therefore, gait features are usually not robust to these action variations. We propose action invariant gait features to address this robustness issue.

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Profiling Biometric Authentication on Mobile Devices

ICB 2019

Sanka Rasnayaka, Sanjay Saha, Terence Sim

Smartphones routinely use multiple biometrics to authenticate users (eg. face, voice, gait). But what is the impact on battery power and device memory? This paper is the first to systematically profile the resource consumption of biometric verification systems.

Teaching

Courses and Talks

CS2030S Programming Methodology II

Semester 1, AY2021-22

This is the second of a 3-part sequence of modules that introduces computer programming. It covers Object-Oriented and Functional Programming (including Lazy Evaluation). Language used is Java.

CS5332 Biometric Authentication

Semester 2, AY2020-21

This is a new graduate module about authentication using biometrics. Aimed at senior undergraduates and Master's students, this module will cover: authentication methods; types of biometrics; pattern recognition; standards, user-acceptance, privacy concerns.

Module web page

Super Speaking

[Ad-hoc]

A one-off talk offering tips for better technical presentations.

Power Papers 1

[Ad-hoc]

Part 1 of How to write technical papers.

Power Papers 2

[Ad-hoc]

Part 2 of How to write technical papers.

Get in Touch

Here are directions to get to my School. 

School of Computing, 13 Computing Drive, Singapore 117417

+65-6516-1180

+65-6779-4580

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