Dr. Dougherty, Alan William

MEng (King's College London), PhD (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Lecturer

Dr. Dougherty earned his Master of Engineering (MEng) in Electronic Engineering from King’s College London, UK, in 2013. He completed his PhD at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2019, during which he was awarded the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship.

His professional experience includes working as an engineer on diverse projects such as compiler design for edge AI inference on FPGAs, autonomous robotic vehicle development, human emotion classification using RGB cameras and human 3D mesh generation from single shot images.

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Medical Robotics, Artificial Intelligence

Key Publications

Y. Sun, Z. Zhang, Z. Luo, A. W. Dougherty, M. H. Yip, Y. K. Choi, and C. Wu, “SAILS: A synchronous accessible immersive online learning system for young learners,” in Proceedings of the 16th ACM multimedia systems conference, in MMSys ’25. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2025, pp. 148–158.
A. W. Dougherty and J. You, “A kernel-based adaptive fuzzy c-means algorithm for m-FISH image segmentation,” in 2017 international joint conference on neural networks (IJCNN), IEEE, 2017, pp. 198–205.
Y. Sun, A. W. Dougherty, Z. Zhang, Y. K. Choi, and C. Wu, “MixSynthFormer: A transformer encoder-like structure with mixed synthetic self-attention for efficient human pose estimation,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 14884–14893.
M. Sun, A. W. Dougherty, B. Huang, Y. Li, and C.-H. Yan, “Accelerating atomic catalyst discovery by theoretical calculations-machine learning strategy,” Advanced Energy Materials, vol. 10, no. 12, p. 1903949, 2020.
M. Sun, T. Wu, A. W. Dougherty, M. Lam, B. Huang, Y. Li, and C.-H. Yan, “Self-validated machine learning study of graphdiyne-based dual atomic catalyst,” Advanced Energy Materials, vol. 11, no. 13, p. 2003796, 2021.
M. Sun, T. Wu, Y. Xue, A. W. Dougherty, B. Huang, Y. Li, and C.-H. Yan, “Mapping of atomic catalyst on graphdiyne,” Nano Energy, vol. 62, pp. 754–763, 2019.
Y. Guo, D. Tao, J. Cheng, A. W. Dougherty, Y. Li, K. Yue, and B. Zhang, “Tensor manifold discriminant projections for acceleration-based human activity recognition,” IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 18, no. 10, pp. 1977–1987, 2016.

Teaching Philosophy

Dr. Dougherty is committed to fostering an engaging and inclusive learning environment that encourages curiosity and critical thinking. He believes in integrating practical applications with theoretical foundations to prepare students for real-world challenges in emerging fields.