FRGS Review

Workshop
Mohammad Faizal Ahmad Fauzi
23rd January 2020
Multimedia University
 Speaker Background
• B. Eng. (Imperial College London, UK) 1997 - 1999
• PhD (University of Southampton, UK) 2000 - 2004

• Lecturer (MMU) 2004-2010

• Senior Lecturer (MMU) 2010 – 2012
• Associate Professor (MMU) 2012 – Present
• Visiting Scholar (Ohio State) 2013-2014, 2017

• Grants: FRGS, ERGS, ScienceFund, TMR&D, IsDB, Fulbright,

MCMC

• FRGS Evaluation Panel 2015 – Present

faizal1@mmu.edu.my 2
 Outline
FRGS Guideline 2020
FRGS Review Process
MyGrants Application
Example of Reviewers’ Comments
Q&A
FRGS Guideline 2020
 Application
• Pemohon amatlah digalakkan untuk berkolaborasi dengan pihak
Industri/Agensi yang berkaitan bagi melaksanakan projek penyelidikan
tersebut (bukti dokumen adalah sekurang-kurangnya surat niat (letter of
intent) dan lain-lain dokumen yang berkaitan).
• Pemohon amatlah digalakkan untuk mengemukakan bukti carian paten
(patent search) bagi setiap permohonan projek.
• Setiap pemohon dibenarkan untuk mengemukakan hanya satu permohonan
projek sahaja pada setiap fasa.
• Permohonan baharu bagi mereka yang telah diluluskan FRGS pada fasa yang
terdahulu akan diberi pertimbangan dengan bukti projek-projek tersebut telah
75% selesai di dalam Modul Pemantauan Sistem MyGRANTS dan disahkan
oleh RMC Institusi. Penyelidik dipohon untuk mengemaskini prestasi projek
penyelidikan secara atas talian melalui Sistem MyGRANTS pada setiap Februari
dan Ogos setiap tahun.
• Tempoh perkhidmatan Ketua Penyelidik mestilah berbaki sekurangkurangnya
dua (2) tahun di Institusi masing-masing mulai daripada tarikh tutup
permohonan FRGS.
 National Priority Areas
Setiap permohonan hendaklah memenuhi salah satu Sektor Keutamaan Negara
(National Priority Areas - NPAs) seperti berikut:-

a) Jaminan Makanan (Food Security);

b) Jaminan Tenaga (Energy Security);
c) Tanaman Perladangan (Plantation Crops);
d) Keselamatan Siber* (Cyber Security);
e) Jaminan Air (Water Security);
f) Kepelbagaian Bio (Biodiversity);
g) Penjagaan Kesihatan dan Perubatan (Healthcare and Medicine);
h) Alam Sekitar dan Perubahan Iklim (Environment and Climate Change); atau
i) Pengangkutan dan Mobiliti (Transportation and Mobility)

*Nota: Sektor Keutamaan ini adalah merangkumi IR4.0 (Cyber Security, Big Data,
Artificial Intelligence) yang merujuk kepada Dasar Negara Mengenai Industri 4.0
(National Policy on Industry 4.0).
 Research Clusters
Setiap permohonan hendaklah memenuhi salah satu kluster
penyelidikan seperti berikut:-

a) Sekuriti dan Keselamatan Makanan (Food Safety & Security);

b) Infrastruktur Asas (Basic Infrastructure);
c) Perubahan Iklim dan Alam Sekitar (Climate Change & Environment);
d) Kesihatan (Health);
e) Pendidikan dan Masyarakat Madani Celik Ilmu (Education &
Knowledgeable Civil Society);
f) Keselamatan Negara (National Security);
g) Kesejahteraan Sosial dan Ekonomi (Social & Economic Wellbeing);
atau
h) Teknologi Terkehadapan & Pembuatan Termaju (Frontier
Technologies & Advanced Manufacturing)
 Research Domain
Setiap permohonan hendaklah memenuhi salah satu domain
penyelidikan seperti berikut:-

a) Sains Tulen dan Gunaan (Pure and Applied Sciences);

b) Teknologi dan Kejuruteraan (Technology and Engineering);
c) Sains Kesihatan dan Klinikal (Clinical and Health Sciences);
d) Sains Sosial (Social Sciences);
e) Sastera dan Sastera Ikhtisas (Arts and Applied Arts);
f) Warisan Alam dan Budaya (Natural and Cultural Heritage);
g) Teknologi Maklumat dan Komunikasi (Information and
Communication Technology).
 Output
• Talent
– 1 PhD or 2 Masters for 3-year project
– 1 Master for 2-year project
• Publications
– At least 2 indexed journals
– Must acknowledge FRGS in the paper
• Intellectual Properties
– Encouraged to apply for IP protection
 Evaluation Criteria
• Penyelidikan yang dipohon mestilah merupakan
penyelidikan yang dapat menghasilkan suatu
idea/teori/konsep/kaedah/model/proses baru; dan
• Penyelidikan yang dapat menambahbaik sesuatu polisi,
metodologi dan model penyelesaian yang sedia ada;
atau
• Penyelidikan yang merangkumi isu-isu kemanusiaan
dan kemasyarakatan bagi tujuan peningkatan nilai
kehidupan dalam negara dan sejagat; atau
• Penyelidikan yang berpotensi untuk menyumbang
kepada agenda strategik negara.
FRGS Review Process
 Role of Evaluators
• Internal Evaluation:
– Department / Faculty / Institute level
– University level
Internal evaluators improve the quality of grant submissions

• IHL Panel requirements:

– 2 internal reviewers (selected by IHL)
– Decision: Highly recommended OR Rejected
Note: only highly recommended decision will be considered
for national level FRGS evaluation.

• KEY CHALLENGE : How to improve?

 Role of Evaluators
• External Evaluation (national level):
– According to clusters
• Engineering always has the largest submissions
– Sponsor level
– Other constraints
• Total numbers
• Grant allocation
• Etc.

• KEY CHALLENGE : How to reject?

 MMU Success Rate
• 2019 2019 submission
– Submitted 355
– Approved 53 (14.9%) nationwide: 7122
• 2018 2018 submission
– Submitted 146
– Approved 21 (14.4%) nationwide: 7079
• 2017 2017 submission
– Submitted 124
– Approved 14 (11.3%)
nationwide: 6284
• 2016 2016 submission
– Submitted 103
– Approved 30 (29.1%) nationwide: 4486
• 2015 2015 submission
– Submitted 129
– Approved 35 (27.1%) nationwide: 3622
MyGrants Application
Title
Title
 Title
• E.G.
– Novel Methods for Spotting and Recognition of Spontaneous
Facial Micro-Expressions from Naturalistic Situations
– Grading and Histoscoring of Breast Carcinoma: Bringing
Machine Intelligence to Malaysian Histopathology Research
– Practical Interference Alignment Techniques with Reduced CSI
Dependency for 5G and Beyond Wireless Communications
– Landslide Prediction with Wireless Sensor Networks using
Non-linear Learning Models
– Intelligent Design of Real-Time Scheduling in Stochastic
Environment of Flexible Flow Shop
– Modified Principal Component Analysis on Hamming Cube for
Action Recognition
Research Information
Track Record
Track Record
Track Record
Executive Summary
Executive Summary
 Executive Summary/Abstract
Example
Problem statement A micro-expression is a brief and involuntary facial movement which reveals a genuine
emotion that a person tries to conceal. While psychologists have been studying facial micro-
expressions since the 1960’s, only until the last few years, the possibility of spotting and
identifying these micro-expressions automatically using machine algorithms has arisen. As
opposed to normal facial expressions which have been intensively studied for decades, this is
a contemporary field of research; we are among three leading institutions in this new field of
research. The analysis of spontaneous micro-expressions has many potential applications;
clinical diagnosis of psychological conditions such as autism and depression, and also criminal
interrogation and lie detection.

This project aims discover novel methods for automatic spotting and recognition of
Objectives spontaneous facial micro-expressions. Firstly, this project endeavors to create the first-ever
dataset for spontaneous micro-expressions elicited from naturalistic situations to challenge
this growing research field. Existing datasets were constructed using only emotional video
Research clips as visual stimuli. Secondly, the crucial first task of micro-expression spotting demands for
novel algorithms that can effectively locate the onset, offset and apex frames from a
methodology continuous video to a good level of precision. Current heuristic-based methods for measuring
their occurrences do not generalize well across different persons. Finally, present state-of-the-
art recognition performance can be improved with new spatio-temporal feature
representations that can robustly amplify and discriminate between micro-expression signals
from different categories.

The expected output of this project is three-fold in terms of new fundamental knowledge and
Expected outcomes findings: Algorithms for representing and spotting micro-expression occurrences, theoretical
spatio-temporal models for better recognition of micro-expressions, and valuable know-how
into the construction of spontaneous micro-expression dataset from naturalistic scenarios.
This project will have far-reaching impacts towards the well-being of the society and public
Significance of safety of the nation with its strong relevancy to governmental policies.
output
Research Background
Research Background
 Problem Statement
Example
A micro-expression is a brief and involuntary facial movement which reveals a genuine emotion that a person
tries to conceal [1, 2]. The duration of a micro-expression is in the range of 1/3 to 1/25 seconds (the generally
acceptable upper limit is 1/2 second at most [2] ), and it typically appears with low intensity, almost difficult to
be observed with the naked eye. As such, a person exhibiting micro-expressions is usually unaware or unable to
control it spontaneously through willpower. While psychologists have been studying facial micro-expressions
since the 1960’s, only until the last few years, it has begun to garner more attention in affective computing
studies. Machine recognition of general facial expressions has been intensively studied in the field of computer
vision for decades [3], but very little research has been done to process and analyze micro-expressions using
computers. The analysis of spontaneous micro-expressions has many potential applications; particularly for
clinical diagnosis of the emotional well-being of the patient, and various mental/psychological conditions such as
autism and depression; and for criminal interrogation, where micro-expressions formed essential clues for
detecting lies and cheating among suspects.

Analysis of spontaneous facial micro-expressions is very challenging, even for human beings [1], due to their
short duration and subtleness in intensity. Generally, given a continuous video clip of a person-of-interest,
analysis of micro-expressions includes performing two inter-connected tasks: “spotting”, followed by
“recognition”. A recent work collecting spontaneous micro-expressions [4] pointed out that human annotators
found the task of spotting challenging and heeded the advice of Ekman to first view the video frame-by-frame
and then with increasing speed [5]. Ekman’s study [6] shows that people without training were only able to
perform ME recognition slightly better than chance, while a trained psychologist is able to perform better but
only up to an accuracy of 40+%. This was not a considerable obstacle for detecting and recognizing normal or
“macro” expressions. Hence, there are several challenges in this relatively new field of work that is worth
pursuing, particularly on the state of current data, and the dual tasks of ME spotting and recognition.
 Problem Statement
Example
Elicitation of MEs is difficult because it is only present at specific situations, when a person tries to suppress felt
emotions but fails to do so, resulting in a leaked emotion manifested as micro-expressions [2]. Both current state-of-the-
art datasets, i.e. SMIC [4] and CASME II [7] (CASME [8] is the predecessor of CASME II), were collected by asking subjects
to watch emotional video stimuli while attempting to keep neutralized faces within a “high-stakes” situation (they will be
penalized for any emotion leaks). However, facial MEs in more naturalistic situations should not be limited to this
particular paradigm of elicitation. Realistic scenarios such as face-to-face conversations/interviews, or a high-stake
situation involving telling of lies about what they have read or seen previously, may also exhibit MEs. Moreover, these
situations reside in a more unconstrained environment (than in a very constrained studio setting) that requires dealing
with other irrelevant facial movements. Also, both the SMIC and CASME II datasets were constructed by extracting short
video samples containing a single emotion each. This is inadequate to cater for a complete spot-then-recognize
procedure, as naturalistic situations may typically comprise of a number of micro-expressions, among a spate of other
kinds of movements.

In order to recognize what type of MEs are present, the MEs must first be spotted, or detected in the video. Thus, the
capability of recognition is strongly dependent on the success of correctly spotting the MEs. Manual spotting of the onset
(starting), apex (strongest) and offset (ending) frames in video is often a time-consuming task that requires high
reliability. Compared to methods for recognition, spotting is also a significantly understudied problem in this area.
Existing approaches are fraught with many impediments, i.e. optimal threshold parameters are overly sensitive and hard
to identify [9], the presence of eye-blinks which had to be manually removed [10]. This is clear indication that research in
micro-expression spotting is still at an early stage.

While the original recognition baselines of CASME II and SMIC starting off (in 2014) at an F1-score of 0.35 and 0.40
respectively, the latest state-of-the-art methods [11] and [12] (our group’s latest work) are now achieving a top score of
0.57 and 0.60 for CASME II and SMIC respectively. Nevertheless, this is still far from being reliable enough for use in
automated recognition systems. Interestingly, many methods in literature have worked primarily on two separate aspects
of the recognition pipeline: temporal pre-processing [12, 13] and spatio-temporal feature representation [14, 15] without
exploiting how they can be seamlessly integrated. On ME data, traditional feature representations [16] do not fare as
well as with visual data from other domains such as normal facial expression and human actions/activities. It is likely that
subtle facial changes across time are difficult to capture and encode into meaningfully discriminative information.
Moreover, the use of motion magnification has not been thoroughly explored; preliminary attempts were made [17, 18]
but improvements had been limited.
 Hypothesis

Example
Due to the above-mentioned problems and challenges, we hypothesize that facial micro-expressions will be a fast-
growing field of study in computer vision and affective computing in the coming years. Research on normal facial
expressions have reached a saturated stage with off-the-shelf products such as Affectiva [19] and Emotient [20]
able to attain almost perfect emotion/expression recognition rates. Meanwhile, research on subtle micro-
expressions remains a new challenge. As of now, there are only three research groups in the world who have been
actively working in this new area since 2014 – namely Oulu University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and
Multimedia University (MMU) (our group).

The recent emergence in advanced techniques such as efficient dense optical flow [21] and Eulerian motion
magnification [22] presents viable solutions for subtly changing facial motions. New spatio-temporal encoding
methods [23] that are robust against noise can be potentially explored and innovated further for this domain of
work. It is envisaged that machine-assisted analysis of facial micro-expressions will in the foreseeable future,
provide auxiliary support for social and scientific domains such as forensic science, criminal investigation, medical
diagnosis and psychotherapy.
 Research Questions

Example
The direction of this research can be summarized with the following questions:

1. How can a new micro-expression dataset be acquired from a comprehensive range of

naturalistic scenarios to accomplish automatic spot-and-recognize procedure?
2. How can facial micro-expressions (in terms of onset, offset and apex frames) be
spotted more precisely to better construct micro-expression sequences?
3. How can robust spatio-temporal representations be designed to recognize the
spotted facial micro-expressions more effectively?
4. How do machine algorithms fare against humans in the task of spotting and
recognizing micro-expressions?
 Relevance to Government Policy
Example
In the past decade, the European community has been paying close attention to the transformation of society
through their very own Social Signal Processing Network (SSPNET) [31] for "social intelligence" research, a multi-
disciplinary foray into how social signals such as nonverbal behavioral cues such as emotions, sentiments, gestures
and prosody can help understand society and interaction between humans in a better way. We take cue of such
importance from developed nations, to enable research in our nation to transform society as well.

With the fundamental nature of the proposed project, the expected research outcomes have deeply-rooted
concepts that are directly transferable to various applied domains, and have far-reaching impacts on the well-
being of the society and public safety of the nation. The prediction of human emotional states, especially in
situations where patients attempt to withhold their emotions is particularly beneficial for clinical assessment of
psychological conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and depression. This is in line with Malaysian government's
policy under the Healthcare National Key Economic Areas (NKEA), which aims to create a supportive ecosystem for
clinical research and diagnosis.

In the aspect of criminal investigation and forensic science, our contributions enable investigators to see through
the hidden emotions of deceptive suspects and criminals, who may attempt to conceal their actual agenda and
motives. Hence, this project has strong relevancy in terms of its potential contribution towards supporting the
National Key Results Areas (NKRA) under Governmental Transformation Policy (GTP) 2.0 in two priority areas: (I)
Fighting Corruption and (II) Reducing Crime. Interrogations of suspects conducted by police or other authorities,
and drug addict rehabilitation efforts can be greatly enhanced with the help of such technology.
Objectives
Objectives
 Objectives
Example
This research study embarks on the following objectives:

1. To create the first known dataset of spontaneous facial micro-expressions

elicited from a wide range of challenging naturalistic situations, complete with
comprehensive emotion labels and coding.
2. To formulate new micro-expression spotting algorithms that can effectively
locate the onset, offset and apex frames from a continuous video to a good
measure of precision.
3. To propose new spatio-temporal feature representations that can robustly
encode micro-expression signals to further improve recognition performance.
4. To validate the machine-automated unified spot-and-recognize scheme against
human performance.
Methodology
Methodology
 Methodology

# of Research Activities should be more than # of Milestones!!

 Methodology
Example of Flowchart
Expected Output
Expected Output
Expected Output
 Expected Output
Example
Novel theories/New findings/Knowledge
1. Fundamental knowledge into how micro-expression movements can be characterized
and spotted from a long continuous video
2. Novel theoretical models that can robustly encode subtly-changing micro-expression
sequences for better recognition performance.
3. New knowledge and know-how into the construction of a spontaneous facial micro-
expression dataset (the very first in Malaysia) from naturalistic situations.

Impact on Society, Economy and Nation

The well-being of the society and public safety of the nation is a key milestone in our
country’s pursuit towards becoming a first-world, developed nation. This project will
have a far-reaching impact as a fundamental research on the prediction of human
emotional states, which is beneficial to various applied domains, especially in the area
of healthcare and crime prevention. This project has a strong relevancy in terms of its
potential contribution towards supporting the Healthcare NKEA, and Governmental
Transformation Policy (GTP) 2.0 in two priority NKRAs: (I) Fighting Corruption and (II)
Reducing Crime.
Quality of Proposal
Equipment & Material
Budget
Budget
Example of Reviewers’ Comments
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message

1. A Good Fit

2. Communication – Clear & Concise

3. A Solid Idea or Conceptual Analysis

4. Work Plan or Methodology

 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
1. A Good Fit
– Review the mission of the Ministry of Education and
the guidelines of the specific grant program to which
the applicant is applying. To make project a good fit.
• E.g. of comments
– Insufficient relevance to the development of
..[area].. applications
– Equipment is ill-suited for a multi-user environment
– Insufficient justification in terms of number of
researchers/GRAs
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
2. Communication – Clear & Concise Language is key to a
good proposal
– Reviewers have limited time and energy to devote to the
proposal. If the applicant makes them work too hard just to
understand what he/she is trying to say, they will have little
energy left to assess the applicant’s ideas.
– Good ideas can be overlooked if the reviewer becomes
distracted by typos, poor grammar, or other errors in
construction.
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
• E.g. of comments (cont.)
– Proposal is poorly written (confusing, not logical,
poorly organized, typos, etc.)
– Lack of detail
– Lack of a thorough thoughts process and clear
story; lack of focus
– Improper or inadequate literature citations
– Improper use of certain terms
– Making assumptions/statements without having a
citations or preliminary data to back it up
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
3. A Solid Idea or Conceptual Analysis
– A strong research proposal takes an innovative idea and
shapes it into a coherent plan that includes sufficient data and
references.
– PLs often fail to provide detail on the thought process behind
the experimental plan.
– The proposal should also include contingency plans to address
potential obstacles.
• E.g. of comments
– Objective needs to be more focused
– Project is too ambitious (unrealistic goals)
– Not sure what new insights will be gained from the proposed
research
– Lack of supporting preliminary data to demonstrate feasibility
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
• E.g. of comments (cont.)
– Proposal does not address obstacles encountered by others
– Plan is illogical
• Successive goals rely on unproven assumption
• Sticks to a narrow hypothesis without discussing or making
allowances for alternative possibilities or approaches
• Too big a leap from preliminary data to the proposed
hypothesis; failure to provide sound scientific data for the
support of the hypothesis
• Idea is a solution in search of a problem
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
4. Work Plan or Methodology
– Reviewers look for a logical, well-designed work plan that
includes sufficient detail to describe:
– How, when, and by whom the work will be done
– How the data will be analyzed, and
– That the necessary skills and resources are available to
complete the proposed research
• E.g. of comments
– Serious flaws in the experimental design; additional
experiments are required
– Using sub-optimal technique: i.e., using out-of-date
techniques, or conversely, using unnecessary new
techniques when standard techniques will work just as
well
 FRGS Reviewer’s Message
• E.g. of comments (cont.)
– Equipment is ill-suited for the proposed projects
– Essential piece of equipment or system not
requested/available
– Timeline is overly optimistic
– Failure to provide a reasonable plan for exchange of
information and coordination among investigators
– Lack of expertise in a specific area of the research
(usually with respect to technology/protocol)
– Long-term equipment maintenance plan is insufficient
 Other Comments
• It is not clear what question is being addressed by the proposal.
– In particular, it is not clear what the outcome of the research might be, or what
would constitute success or failure. It is vital to discuss what contribution to
human knowledge would be made by the research.
• The question being addressed is woolly or ill-formed.
– The committee are looking for evidence of clear thinking both in the formulation
of the problem and in the planned attack on it.
• It is not clear why the question is worth addressing.
– The proposal must be well motivated.
• There is no evidence that the proposers will succeed where others have failed.
– It is easy enough to write a proposal with an exciting-sounding wish-list of hoped-
for achievements, but you must substantiate your goals with solid evidence of
why you have a good chance of achieving them.
• The proposed research has already been done - or appears to have been done.
– Rival solutions must be discussed and their inadequacies revealed.

59
 Other Comments
• A new idea is claimed but insufficient technical details of the idea
are given for the committee to be able to judge whether it looks
promising.
– Since the committee cannot be expert in all areas there is a danger
of overwhelming them with technical details, but it is better to err by
overwhelming them than by underwhelming them. They will usually
get an expert referee to evaluate your idea.
• The proposers seem unaware of related research.
– Related work must be mentioned, if only to be dismissed. Otherwise,
the committee will think that the proposers are ignorant and,
therefore, not the best group to fund. The case for support should
have a list of references like any paper, and you should look at it to
check it has a balanced feel - your referee will do so. Do not make
the mistake of giving references only to your own work!
60
 Other Comments
• The proposal is badly presented, or incomprehensible to all but
an expert in the field.
– Remember that your proposal will be read by non-experts as
well as (hopefully) experts. A good proposal is simultaneously
comprehensible to non-experts, while also convincing experts
that you know your subject. Keep highly-technical material in
well-signposted section(s); avoid it in the introduction.
• The proposers seem to be attempting too much for the funding
requested and time-scale envisaged.
– Such lack of realism may reflect a poor understanding of the
problem or poor research methodology.
• The proposal is too expensive for the probable gain.
– If it is easy to see how to cut the request for
people/equipment/travel, etc. to something more reasonable
then it might be awarded in reduced form. More likely, it will
be rejected.
61
 Common Failings
1. Did not follow application guidelines exactly.
2. Not new or lack of original ideas
- e.g. routine application of known techniques.
3. Lack of knowledge of published relevant work
4. Diffuse, superficial or unfocused research plan
5. Lack of experience in the essential methodology
- uncritical approach
6. Insufficient experimental detail
- or questionable reasoning in experimental approach
7. Unrealistically large amount of work
8. Unacceptable scientific rationale
9. Uncertainty concerning the future directions

62
Messages From RMC
Source: MOHE 2018
 Budget
FRGS Guidelines
Vote 11000 Labour GRA (Pursuing Master: RM1800,
Pursuing PhD: RM2300)
Vote 21000 T & T Conference & training: 20%
Total T & T: 40% of project cost
Vote 24000 Rental Relates to research

Vote 27000 Research Relates to research

Materials
Vote 28000 M & M Minor repairs & modifications

Vote 29000 Special 5% of project cost

Services
Vote 35000 Accessories 40% of project cost
& Equipment
TOTAL RM250,000.00 (Maximum)
3-Year (Maximum)
• Pemohon amatlah digalakkan untuk berkolaborasi dengan pihak
Industri/Agensi yang berkaitan bagi melaksanakan projek penyelidikan
tersebut (bukti dokumen adalah sekurang-kurangnya surat niat (letter of
intent) dan lain-lain dokumen yang berkaitan).
• Pemohon amatlah digalakkan untuk mengemukakan bukti carian paten
(patent search) bagi setiap permohonan projek.
Questions?