On December 15, 2020, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University led by Professor Supot Techavorasinskul, D.Eng., Dean of Engineering, along with the executive members and personnel of the Faculty of Engineering have delivered donations such as clothing, winter wear, school supplies, medicines and medical supplies, etc. to assist those in need in the rural areas. In this regard, Faculty of Engineering cooperated with the other 2 local donation projects which are the Sharing Kindness to the Mountains project and the donation project to help the children of the mountains to be the medium of forwarding these items to the communities living in rural areas on the mountains in Chiang Mai.

#ChulaEngineering #InnovationTowardSustainability

The One Day Tour | Learn Day Share held by Office of International Affairs, Faculty of Engineering, on November 14, 2020, was the event that aimed to cultivate public consciousness and develop understanding about sustainable living. There were altogether 25 international students and Thai students and staffs who joined this event.

The three activities of this event took place at Bangnamphueng Homestay, a community enterprise which hold on to the idea of sufficiency economy from King Rama IX. The first activity was the making of tie dye tote bag from natural color. This dye color is extracted from the coat of Nipa palm fruit which commonly grow around this area. People in Bangnamphueng community try to make use of Nipa palm by using the fruits to cook food, the leaves to create container, and the fruit coats to make dye color. The second activity was the cooking of Khanom Thuai, an easy cooking Thai dessert. This dessert requires a few ingredients and the recipe is simple enough for everyone to cook at home by themselves. The last activity of this event was a water treatment to improve the community area by using EM made from organic waste within the community.

On August 4, 2020, Chula Engineering together with Huawei Technology (Thailand) Co., Ltd. signed a memorandum of understanding on research support and development of engineering innovation through 5G, AI, and Cloud technology. This collaboration aims to support research activities and develop engineering innovation of Chula Engineering which drives Thailand forward to digital transformation. Since Chula Engineering has been conducting R&D programs on the robotic system, automatic control system, and virtual reality system, through this five-year MOU, the integrated technology of 5G, Cloud, and AI from Huawei will help strengthen the potential and efficiency of engineering inventions to have a better remote control system and processor. Over the past year, Chula Engineering and Huawei Technology (Thailand) Co., Ltd. have been working together to exchange technological knowledge through seminars and workshops led by world-class technology and solutions experts who share their experience and expertise exclusively with faculty members, students as well as researchers.

Faculty members from Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, including Assistant Professor Dr. Chatpan Chintanapakdee (Department of Civil Engineering, and Director of Risk and Disaster Management Program), Dr. Natt Leelawat (Department of Industrial Engineering and Head of Disaster and Risk Management Information Systems Research Group), and Dr. Jing Tang (International School of Engineering) were invited by Director of the United Nations Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development (UN-APCICT/ESCAP) as the experts in the field to participate in the Expert Group Meeting on ICT for Disaster Risk Management, as part of the ESCAP’s Disaster Resilience Week at the United Nations Conference Centre Bangkok during August 26-27, 2019.

Dr. Natt (left) and Asst. Prof. Dr. Chatpan (right) were invited to participate in the Expert Group Meeting

Dr. Natt Leelawat was invited as the representative of Thailand to give a presentation in the Session 6: National experiences on ICT for DRM and sharing best practices. He gave a talk on “ICT4DRM: Experience from Thailand”. He summarized the ICT experience from the academic institute perspective including the related course, “Disaster Management and Technology” of Department of Industrial Engineering, Chulalongkorn University; researches of the Disaster and Risk Management Information Systems Research Group (DRMIS) of Chula Engineering; the Risk and Disaster Management Program of Graduate School; SATREPS Project-Regional Resilience Enhancement through Establishment of Area-BCM at Industry Complexes in Thailand; and other related studies.

Dr. Natt gave a talk

There were many participants from many national government officers, international organizations, and academic institutes from various countries participated in the meeting.

During June 5-11, 2019, four Chula Engineering faculty members, including Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anat Ruangrassamee (Department of Civil Engineering), Asst. Prof. Dr. Chatpan Chintanapakdee (Department of Civil Engineering), Dr. Piyatida Ruangrassamee (Department of Water Resources Engineering), and Dr. Natt Leelawat (Department of Industrial Engineering), gave lectures in the Risk and Disaster Management Program of Graduate School, Chulalongkorn University’s co-organized workshop, “the 2nd PREEMPTIVE Advanced Studies Institute: Thailand”. It is the series of the multidisciplinary workshop supported by the US National Science Foundation.

The theme of the workshop was about tsunami disaster. The participants are the graduate and undergraduate students from USA and Thailand, including Chulalongkorn University, Kasem Bundit University, The University of Connecticut, Southern California University, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, University of Rhode Island, etc.

The first day of the event was done at Kasem Bundit University, Bangkok. Four faculty members of Chula Engineering gave lectures on the Day1.

Asst. Prof. Dr. Chatpan Chintanapakdee gave a lecture on “Earthquake Disaster and Preparedness in Thailand.” Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anat Ruangrassamee gave a lecture on “Tsunami Disaster and Mitigation.” Dr. Natt Leelawat presented “Disaster Management.” Lastly, Dr. Piyatida Ruangrassamee presented “Flood and Water Security.”

The goal of this workshop is to practice preparing the research proposal between Thai and US students. The participants also went to Phuket to visit the real sites in order to observe the current situation. They visited the sites such as Tsunami Memorial Monument, Evacuation Shelter, T. 813 Monument, and Tsunami Memorial Museum at Phang Nha Province.

The group then came back to Bangkok and continued their discussion using the iScale Classroom at Chula Engineering to do group brainstorm and propose new tsunami risk reduction project to the faculty members from Thailand and the USA.

It has been a great work and experience from both Thailand and the USA to apply different background and knowledge and came out with a new idea.

The Project on Regional Resilience Enhancement through Establishment of Area-BCM at Industry Complexes in Thailand

Photo: JCC members and participants

On May 31, 2019, at 13:00, the SATREP’s the Project on Regional Resilience Enhancement through Establishment of Area-BCM at Industry Complexes in Thailand organized the second Joint Coordinating Committee (JCC) meeting at Mandarin C Meeting Room, Mandarin Hotel Bangkok. There were representatives from the related organizations including the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Japan Science and Technology (JST), Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT), International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management (ICHARM), National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED), and Keio University from Japan; Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM), Department of Industrial Works (DIW), Department of Public Works and Town & Country Planning Rojana Industrial Park, Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand), Royal Irrigation Department (RID), Thai Meteorological Department (TMD), Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA), Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), National Statistical Office (NSO), Hydro Informatics Institute (HII), Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), Ayutthaya Rajabhat University, etc.; as well as faculties and institutes of Chulalongkorn University including Faculty of Engineering, College of Populations Studies, Transportation Institute, Faculty of Architecture, and the Risk and Disaster Management Program of Graduate School.

Dr. Natt Leelawat from the Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering; and the Risk and Disaster Management Program, was a Master of Ceremony of the meeting. The meeting was started with an opening remark by Prof. Dr. Kiat Ruxrungtham (Vice President for Research and Innovation of Chulalongkorn University). After that, Mr. Takeuchi Kazuo (Senior Representative of the Japan International Cooperation Agency: JICA) also gave an opening remark.

Then, Asst. Prof. Dr. Ruttiya Bhula-Or (College of Population Studies), as a Project Manager and Technical Coordinator, reported the implementation structure to the participants.

The next session started with the overall summary of the project by Prof. Watanabe Kenji. And it was followed by each item’s progress report. Dr. Nakasu Tadashi (College of Population Studies) presented the progress report of Item 0 (Community Survey). Asst. Prof. Dr. Anurak Sriariyawat (Faculty of Engineering) and Dr. Miyamoto Mamoru (ICHARM) presented the progress report of Item 1 (Hazard Analysis).

After the coffee break, Dr. Kamimera Hideyuki (NIED) and Ms. Tobishima Yoriko (Nagoya Institute of Technology) presented the progress report of Item 2 (Business Impact Analysis), And lastly, Asst. Prof. Dr. Kodaka Akira and Dr. Natt Leelawat presented the progress report of Item 3 (Area-BCM).

Then, Dr. Natt Leelawat, as a Project Manager, introduced the Disaster and Risk Management Information Systems (DRMIS) Research Group as an input summary from Thai side while Assoc. Prof. Ino Eri presented the input summary and plan from Japanese side.

The Q&A and suggestion session was opened to all participants. There were many participants asked many question and provided many good suggestions. This session was run using both Thai and English languages.

After that, Mr. Miura Yoshiaki, JICA Project Coordinator, mentioned the draft minutes of meetings. There were many fruitful discussion and comments along the meeting. Finally, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vipan Prachuabmoh (Dean of College of Population Studies) gave a closing remark to close the 2nd JCC meeting.

The meeting was successful. The JCC members are looking forward to the involvement of all participated organizations.

(Written by Dr. Natt Leelawat)

Contact:
Dr. Tadashi Nakasu
College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University
Email: tadashi.nakasu@gmail.com

Assistant Professor Dr. Ruttiya Bhula-Or
College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University
Email: ruttiya.b@chula.ac.th

Dr. Natt Leelawat
Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University,
Email: natt.l@chula.ac.th

Free Seminar for Chula Engineering Students (all majors)
Department of Industrial Engineering, Chula Engineering, and The University of Tokyo, Japan, present
“Text Mining by Using Python: Application to Patent Documents”
Instructor: Prof. Kazuyuki Motohashi (U-Tokyo, Japan)
Teaching Assitant: Dr. Suchit Pongnumkul
Date: May 27, 29, 31, 2019
Time: 09:00-12:00
Venue: Room 407, 4F, Engineering Building 4, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University
Language: English (and Thai by TA)

• Contents
  – Introduction to patent data analysis
  – What is patent data? Why is it used for technology management research?
  – Various kinds of patent database: PATSTAT, JPO (IIP patent database), USPTO
  – Keyword extraction, TF-IDF, similarity measures
  – VIDEO (O’Reilly Media) https://www.oreilly.com/learning/how-do-i-compare-document-similarity-using-python
  – HOMEWORK: Apply patent abstract documents to the Video exercise above, and extract three keywords by using TF-IDF scores
• Patent Similarity
  – Review of homework
  – Preprocessing of text: tokenization regularization (lowering character), stemming/lemmatization and stop words exclusion
  – Text processing of tf-idf vectors:

1. Create dictionary: mapping every word to a number
2. Corpus (list of bags of words) : a list of number of words occurring in each documents
– Calculation of similarity measures across each documents : genism.similarities
– Topic Modeling
– What is topic modeling (with some examples)
1. Understanding the concept: LDA
– Gensim module in Python Topic modeling works for the following three technologies, comparison with JPO classification
1. Artificial intelligence
2. Autonomous driving
3. Gene modification technology
– Good reference about topic modeling by genism https://www.machinelearningplus.com/nlp/topic-modeling-gensim-python/
– Assignment for further works (three weeks program)

RSVP at https://forms.gle/mPYfDKYx8VmR8jQM8
Capacity: 20 seats
(Registration deadline: May 18, 2019)
Contact: Natt Leelawat, D.Eng. (natt.l@chula.ac.th)

On March 6, 2019, Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, welcomed Prof. Dr. Adedeji B. Badiru, Dean of Graduate School of Engineering and Management, The Air Force Institute of Technology, USA, and his wife.

During their visit, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Paveena Chaovalitwongse (Department Head), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wipawee Tharmmaphornphilas, Asst. Prof. Poom Luangjamekorn, Asst. Prof. Surapong Sirikulvadhana, Dr. Amonsiri Vilasdaechamont, and Dr. Natt Leelawat from the Department of Industrial Engineering; and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Chuvej Chansa-ngavej (Deputy Director of the Regional Centre for Manufacturing Systems Engineering (RCMSE) , Chulalongkorn University) joined the meeting and discussion on curriculum and research between the two universities.

After that, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Chuvej Chansa-ngavej introduced the RCMSE to the visitors. Then, Dr. Natt Leelawat (Head of the Disaster and Risk Management Information Systems Research Group, Chulalongkorn University) introduced the DRMIS Lab to the visitors.

The Chulalongkorn University and the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) have signed a Centre of Excellence agreement today, which will support the development of road infrastructure safety in Thailand as well as internationally.

 Speaking from the Safety 2018 Conference in Bangkok, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Associate Professor Kasem Choocharukul said we are delighted to join with iRAP’s nine Centres of Excellence world-wide to provide road infrastructure safety technical leadership.

“As a Centre of Excellence, Chulalongkorn University will focus on building local capacity for high quality risk mapping, star rating and safer road investment planning assessments across Thailand.  We will also work in partnership with the Ministry of Transport, Department of Highways, Department of Rural Roads, Office of Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning, the University and other key stakeholders to build a locally led ThaiRAP programme that will save lives and serious injuries across the country”.

“This partnership with iRAP will build on our Road Assessment Programme experience made possible through the Bloomberg Philanthropies supported BIGRS partnership with the World Bank-GRSF and iRAP.  The links with iRAP’s partner network across more than 90 countries worldwide will ensure we can accelerate progress toward the achievement of the UN Targets and eliminate high-risk roads across the country,” Professor Choocharukul said.

Road Infrastructure Star Rating assessments are already informing safer road designs and upgrade projects in Thailand, including assessments with the Department of Highways, Department of Rural Roads and Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and detailed training is already building local capacity for the future.

iRAP Chief Executive Officer Rob McInerney said addressing the level of death and injury on roads in Thailand is a priority for the country and the world.  The World Health Organisation reports that Thailand has the second highest road traffic fatality rate in the world with an annual estimate of over 24,000 deaths or 66 deaths every day. Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists account for 83% of road fatalities in Thailand and road crashes cost Thailand an estimated 3 to 5 % of its GDP (WHO, 2018).

“The expertise of Chulalongkorn University and other local partners in building a successful ThaiRAP programme can help reduce death and injury across the country.  In particular the elimination of 1 and 2-star roads for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists is a priority. Meeting the UN Global Road Safety Target to achieve more than 75% of travel on 3-star or better roads for all road users in Thailand by 2030 will reduce death and injury across the country by more than a third.  Importantly iRAP estimates there will be at least ฿34 of benefits for every ฿1 invested” Mr McInerney said. 

“Chulalongkorn University has a 101 year history as Thailand’s national university and is well placed to be a Centre of Excellence having demonstrated distinction in road safety engineering and focused research activities for the public good.  Local innovation and expertise in providing evidence-based solutions for vulnerable road users will save lives in Thailand and will benefit all of the iRAP partners around the world.”

“We look forward to working with Chulalongkorn University as well as the Thai Government, mobility clubs, development banks and local road safety stakeholders to build a great ThaiRAP programme and save lives across the country,” Mr McInerney said.

Other iRAP Centres of Excellence include ARRB Group in Australia, Instituto Mexicano del Transporte (IMT), Labtrans in Brazil, the Korea Transport Institute (KOTI), Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS), MRIGlobal based in the USA, TRL in the United Kingdom,  and SWOV in the Netherlands.

iRAP is a Global Charity which provides tools and training to help governments, mobility clubs, funding agencies, development banks, research institutes and other non-government organisations in more than 90 countries to help make their roads safer.

Star Ratings are based on road inspection data and provide a simple and objective measure of the level of safety which is ‘built-in’ to the road for vehicle occupants, motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians. Five-star roads are the safest while one-star roads are the least safe. 3-star or better is the goal standard.

For further information on the current situation of Thailand’s roads, the road attributes that matter to mitigate risk, and the business case for safer roads, visit the Vaccines for Roads Big Data Tool.

Media enquiries to:

Judy Williams, Global Programme Manager, iRAP

email : judy.williams@irap.org, tel +61 400 782 20

Associate Prof Kasem Choocharukul, PhD, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University

email : kasem.choo@chula.ac.th, tel +66 2218 6309