Teaching Schedule Is Out

12 January 2017 (Thursday)

Teaching schedule for Semester II 2016/17 has been finalized. Looks like I'll be teaching SKM4311 (Animation for Multimedia Production) and SKM3300 (Multimedia Application Development). The former is an elective course, intended for Seniors (final year) undergraduate students undertaking Multimedia major and following the Games stream, and the latter is a core subject for third year Human Development and Information Technology students. Both will require lab sessions, and overall, I am looking at 8 hours of teaching a week. This is by far the most I have been assigned to teaching (UPM is a Research University, afterall), but budget cut has stated that the Uni will no longer pay for lab instructors, but will be taught by lecturers instead. Time to buckle up!

Quality Award Day

Our Faculty held the Quality Day on 11 January 2017. The Q-Day is a day where awards are handed out to all deserving members of FSKTM on their excellent performance the year prior. Some of the awards include, Best Teaching Award, Highest Grant, Highest Number of Publications, etc. The Multimedia Department bagged the Most Active in Industrial Relations and Community Work Award. Well done, team!

Supervision: Semesterly Lunch Date, Our Tradition

We had our semesterly lunch yesterday (10/1/2017) afternoon at Johnny's in IOI City Mall. It was nice to gather all five of my postgraduate research students together in one setting. It was extremely pleasant to see Bella again after she had delivered her baby boy, Syabil and also her husband who joined us at the lunch. Syabil is only a month old, such a cutie! Semesterly lunch is definitely a nice tradition worth keeping :)

Supervision: Master Presentations

On Tuesday (10/1/2017), three of my Master students presented their works to their assessors and myself. First up was Nametso, who presented her proposal on her Gesture-based Virtual Piano. Nametso needs to add a few more things on her LR, but more importantly, she needs to start developing, at least to get a working prototype done, so she can actually understand and solve the issues at hand. She has one more semester to complete this (Project for Master by coursework in UPM typically takes two semesters - one semester is for coming up with the proposal and the next semester is for actual development and dissertation writing).

Later in the afternoon, Bella presented her proposal, which was also her 1-year defense. Bella is currently away on maternity leave, and had only came in that afternoon for the presentation. She needs to get her hands dirty and starts working on her proof-of-concept as soon as she gets back in the lab in a few weeks' time.

Amy's turn followed after. Amy's presented her Literature Review. Glad that the assessors found that her project seemed interesting and they were happy with her materials. Alhamdulillah, a step in the right direction.

Teaching: Last Paper

Invigilated my own paper (SKM4311) last Sunday afternoon (8 January 2017). Last paper of the semester for me, last paper EVER for them. These final year students are done with their formal education, as they part ways to their respective industrial placement for the next semester before graduating in October. Well done students of Bachelor Computer Science (Majoring in Multimedia) Cohort 2013/14. It was a pleasure teaching you guys (three subjects in total). See (some of) you in your ties and shirts next semester at your internship companies!

PhD Students Presentation

6 January 2017 (Friday)

Two of the students whom I co-supervised presented their semester progress report. Syura and Faiz are in their fourth semester of their PhDs, under the main supervision of Dr. Azrul.

Teaching: Eleventh Hour, Well, Almost

Invigilating exam today. Sorry, crossed that, TONIGHT. My very own Creative Design Elements paper, which started at 8.30 p.m. and ended at 10.30 p.m. Phew... it was a LONGGGG night. I even made a mistake of announcing in the hall that there was only 15 minutes left on the clock left at 9.45 p.m., which the students all gasped in horror. I was then corrected by my co-worker stating the exam was not scheduled to finish at 10 p.m., but 10.30 p.m., so the students (and me) still had another 45 more minutes to go. Haha. Seeing that we already got to work at 8 a.m. in the morning, and only to clock out at 11 p.m. (tidying up after the exam), it was a rather justified error on my part. Nevertheless, we all survived to the eleventh hour. I just hope these students didn't start revising on the eleventh hour - I had not designed this to be an easy paper :)