Evaluating research applications for fundamental research grant scheme(FRGS)

Doing research is the in-thing in UiTM now. Everyone is struggling to cope with this the best way we can. I mean with teaching, exams and now research; things will get pretty uptight. But to survive that end of the month paycheck, you are somehow obliged to the system.  What can I say this is life.. and most importantly my life. Honestly, I think UiTM staff/lecturers are getting into research quite well. Many have produced outstanding products and research articles. Sometime I do feel a bit intimidated when compared to my own accomplishments. Nothing . Just a big stack pile of craps that have no RU-value whatsoever. But you know what? I love it. I love what I do and I love my big pile of craps….all the articles and papers that I have written all this while. Some just sitting quietly somewhere in the hard disk waiting for me to read them over and over again.  I read them, admire/sometime cry over them and put them back in the folders. They are my stories about nothing, my poems about love, sex and naked self, some unfinished articles and scribbles about things around me. I guess I am a mad writer, writing for his own literary fulfillment. The ones posted in the blog are the general audience rated----flat and boring.

Anyway, today’s research evaluation exercise saw a few proposals that I think were very good(hmmm...maybe some)

1. Modeling Bio-Inspired Techniques For The Purpose of Texture-Based Image Segmentation : Quite good topic for research. The subject is pretty straight forward but with the emergence of various “bio-inspired” techniques we need to know which one is the best especially for this particular domain.

Budget : 50K

Level of Difficulty : Moderate

I-Like Rating :  3 out of max 5

2. Mining Medical Data For Diagnosing The Patient Condition : This one is my favorite because of the dynamic domain and endless future research opportunity. But again it is good only if they can get all the data properly and the tools robustly designed.

Budget : 81K

Level of Difficulty : Very Difficult

I-Like Rating : 4.5 /5.0

3. Integrating Medicinal Plant Databases … : Highly biotech stuff. This research is an evident that our research direction has gone into new domain which is very popular outside. I have no objection as the team has proved capable to pursue such  challenging endeavour.

Budget : 55K

Level of Difficulty : Moderate

I-Like Rating : 3/5

4. Shape Recognition in  Responsive Learning Environment: This proposal from Multimedia colleague shows a good initiative. It is about time we have a lot of high tech multimedia research as the domain has huge potential in terms of commercial value. Somehow our staff like to play with power point and ignore a big portion of dynamic research area of multimedia.

Budget : 32K (I don’t think this is enough)

Level of Difficulty : Moderate

I-Like Rating : 2.75/5

5. Web Personalization : This proposal came from our IT department and tends to improve the search mechanism on the web. Usually we get garbage whenever we use Mr Google or Mr Yahoo but this soon will be things of the past when this research is completed.

Budget : 96K

Level of Difficulty : Easy

I-Like Rating : -(

6. Kansei Engineering : This is about that Japanese engineering methodology. The word Kansei is a Japanese term that reflects  the feeling and emotion people have in their mind when interacting with a product. I think the Look East policy is already obsolete and any cultural thing out Japan is as good as our own kampong style method. It is time to give up the superiority of the “other“ people that once brutally colonized our country and killed many of our countrymen.

Budget : 100K

Level of Difficulty : Easy

I-Like Rating : -(

7. Governance Portfolio Measurement : The proposal is about looking into the determinant of good governance use them to measure potential good governance in IT projects. I was confused as you are but overall I think this one is viable.

Budget : 111K

Level of Difficulty : Moderate

I-Like Rating : 2.5/5

All in all they are good proposals but the important thing is whether they contribute to the direction of UiTM’s research direction. I still have my doubt.