Distinguished UTM alumnus and national leader honoured for his leadership, scholarship, and impact on global standing.
JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- After an illustrious 37-year career in academia and public service, Dato' Seri Ir. Dr. Zaini Ujang, one of Malaysia's most respected administrators and scholars, has been conferred the title of Professor Emeritus in conjunction with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia's 69th Convocation Ceremony.
A Distinguished Career of Service and Leadership
As a proud double alumnus of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Dr. Zaini earned a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering (1988) before pursuing a PhD in Environmental Engineering at Newcastle University. An internationally recognized scholar, he has authored over 250 scientific papers and 36 books, including Ecoshift: Holistic Transformation towards Environmental Sustainability (2018) and Japanese Ecosophy: A Traveller's Notes (2019). His research excellence in water engineering and sustainability has earned him fellowships at renowned institutions including MIT, Imperial College London, Tsukuba, and Lund University.
Additionally, Dr. Zaini's appointment as Vice-Chancellor of UTM from 2008 to 2013 marked a historical milestone, as the first UTM alumnus and youngest individual to lead a public university in Malaysia. He remains the only Malaysian to have served as Secretary-General of five key ministries, namely Higher Education, Health, Human Resources, Environment and Water, and Energy, Green Technology and Water. Moreover, as the Chairman of the Technical Committee for the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint 2015–2025, Dr. Zaini played a pivotal role in shaping Malaysia's higher education transformation agenda. These leadership roles reflect his extraordinary versatility and impact on national development.
Dr Zaini's professional journey, from being a UTM academic to Vice-Chancellor, policymaker, and global ambassador, exemplifies the transformative leadership that UTM continues to nurture. His long-standing commitment to knowledge, ethics, and service certainly underscores UTM's vision of producing graduates who lead with intellect and integrity, advancing both national progress and global collaboration,
Even beyond retirement, Dr. Zaini continues to serve the nation. In March 2025, he was reappointed as Chairman of the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA), reaffirming his continued leadership in shaping Malaysia's higher education quality standards and global benchmarking. Through this role, he continues to guide academic governance and innovation, ensuring Malaysia's education system remains internationally competitive and aligned with future skills demands in sustainability and digital transformation.
Expanding Malaysia's Knowledge Agenda: 100-Day World Lecture Tour
Following his retirement from public service in March 2025, he embarked on a new transformative academic mission, the 100-Day World Lecture Tour, marking the close of a remarkable 37-year journey that reshaped Malaysia's higher education and environmental landscape.
Spanning 15 countries and more than 40 world-leading universities and research institutions, the tour, held between April and July 2025, served as a platform to promote Malaysia's "culture of knowledge" on the global stage.
Throughout his travels, Dr. Zaini met with academic and research leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and Turkiye, among others. He delivered more than 40 lectures, engaged with 10 university presidents, and fostered international partnerships aimed at strengthening Malaysia's higher education and research ecosystems. His lectures and dialogues emphasized how cross-cultural collaboration, environmental ethics, and innovation are central in shaping the future of universities.
"It is important to broaden global perspectives in higher education and strengthen international academic collaboration to deliver meaningful benefits to Malaysia, particularly its institutions of higher learning." Said DS Ir. Ts. Dr Zaini.
Following his return, he initiated a series of sharing sessions across Malaysian higher learning institutions, inspiring academics and students to "build knowledge networks without borders" and to translate global insights into meaningful local change.
"Exposure to the cultures and education systems of various countries provides academics with significant opportunities to gain new knowledge and create strategic avenues for research and development collaboration," he said while delivering his address to more than 400 academic staff, administrators, and students of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.
Therefore, Dr. Zaini's lifelong service demonstrates that leadership is not defined by position, but by purpose. His 100-Day World Tour represents more than a personal milestone, but also a national statement that Malaysia's intellectual capital is ready to engage, exchange, and compete on the global stage.
About Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM):
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is a research-intensive public university specialising in engineering, science, and technology, with a growing international profile in sustainability, innovation, and the humanities. Established in 1904 and located in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, UTM is dedicated to producing global talents, impactful research, and meaningful partnerships that contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Dato' Seri Ir. Dr. Zaini Ujang's conferred the 'Professor Emeritus' title in conjunction with MK69 UTM
|
Powered by LightX2V inference framework to enable low‑cost, high-throughput video generation
HONG KONG, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SenseTime launched its Seko 2.0, a multi-episode drama generation agent tailored for short drama and motion comic creators. Supporting production up to 100-episode series, Seko 2.0 ensures consistency in characters, scenes, and props across episodes. It significantly boosts production efficiency, reducing comic drama production time by 80% to 90% compared to traditional methods.
Seko 2.0 is powered by SenseTime's open‑source LightX2V framework, the industry's first inference framework capable of real‑time video generation. This innovative framework allows for cost-effective and high-throughput video production.
Supporting 100-episode series generation
First launched in July 2025, Seko attracted over 100,000 creators within two months and its user base surpassed 200,000 in less than half a year, 30% of which were short drama creators and 20% comic drama creators.
The new Seko 2.0 further lowers the creative threshold and enables more efficient video production. Its key upgraded features include:
- A revamped User Interface (UI) with optimized visual presentation, delivering an immersive creative experience.
- Multi-episode generation capability with long-context management, supporting the creation up to 100 episodes.
- Intelligent Agent scheduling, enabling flexible association of characters, scenes, and props across episodes, with character makeup and styling adaptable to different scenarios.
Xu Li, Chairman of the Board and CEO of SenseTime, stated: "Seko will open a door for people, who have creative imagination, but lack of professional production capabilities, so they can truly enter the creative ecosystem and unleash their imagination." He added that, as AI capabilities continue to evolve, the quality of generated episodes will gradually move up, generating both refined "high-brow" works and popular "low-brow" content that can coexist harmoniously.
AI comic and short dramas have experienced an explosive growth in China. Data shows that the supply of comic dramas in mainland China surged at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 83% in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 works were produced with total revenues jumping by 12 times. Many individual creators and small teams have joined this creative trend, some even taking it as their second career.
Enabling multi-person lip-sync & audio-visual synchronization
Most existing AI video generation products on the market only support single-episode short films or clip production. To meet creators' urgent demand for high-quality, large-scale multi-episode production, Seko 2.0 achieves two core technology breakthroughs:
1) SekoIDX: Achieving character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot scenarios
Maintaining character consistency across episodes and shots has long been an industry challenge. Traditional generation methods often result in characters appearing as "copied and pasted" (lacking vividness) or "unrecognizable" when responding to new motion or expression promots. By introducing "negative reference images" in the high-noise phase of diffusion models, SekoIDX ensures character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot content while avoiding excessive similarity to reference images. It also maintains high stability when responding to commands for different expressions, poses, and scenes.
2) SekoTalk: Realizing multi-person lip-sync and natural audio-visual synchronization
Traditional digital human technology often suffers from inaccurate lip-sync in complex scenarios involving multi-language and multi-person interactions. As the industry's first solution supporting lip-sync for more than two people, SekoTalk achieves highly precise audio-visual synchronization from single-person to multi-person interactions through a series of innovative designs, whether for daily conversations, intense arguments, or group counting.
These underlying technology breakthroughs directly translate to a leap in productivity. Under the traditional workflow, a team would typically take over three months to complete 50 episodes. With Seko 2.0, the comic drama production cycle can be reduced by 80% to 90%. Seko's comprehensive features make it feasible for independent creators to produce videos in a "one-person crew" model.
- Explore SekoTalk, built on LightX2V and SenseTime's generation model, enabling multi‑person lip‑sync and natural audio‑visual synchronization for videos: http://sekotalk.com/
Adapting to domestic solutions
Multi-episode creation of AI short dramas and comic dramas involves a large number of shots. A single 5-second video requires generating nearly 100,000 tokens, and 10 to 20 shots can result in a total token demand of 1 to 2 million.
To address this challenge, SenseTime has developed Phased DMD Distillation technology, which can significantly reduce the overall cost of multi-episode generation. By combining phased distillation with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, it allows different models to specialize in different stages of the generation process, substantially improving overall model capability and efficiency without increasing inference costs.
SenseTime has also open-sourced LightX2V, the industry's first inference framework enabling real-time video generation. Through optimizations such as DiT distillation acceleration, lightweight VAE, and sparse attention, it achieves low-cost real-time video generation. LightX2V can generate a 5-second video on consumer-grade graphics cards in under 5 seconds, significantly outperforming Sora2, which takes several minutes. To date, it has accumulated over 5.3 million downloads and has gained widespread popularity among creators worldwide.
On domestic chip platforms, Seko can achieve generation effects comparable to international chip platforms in similar timeframes. International chip platforms can generate 1.25 seconds of video per second of operation, while domestic chip platforms generate 1.0625 seconds per second. With domestic chip performance improving and ecosystem maturing, this gap is expected to further narrow down.
In the future, SenseTime will also offer domestic solution options for Seko creators, ushering in a low-cost era of AI video creation with extreme cost-performance ratio.
Topping Douyin's AI short drama chart
In the comic and short drama market, Seko has successfully incubated a series of hit shows, including the live-action short drama "Wan Xin Ji", which topped Douyin's AI Short Drama Chart. Works such as "I Built a Doomsday Fortress on the Mountain Top" and "Yin Shen Lu" have also gained widespread attention.
In the high-quality film and television sector, Seko has officially reached a strategic partnership with Yangtze River Film Group, a leading enterprise in the film and television industry. The two parties will jointly explore the integrated innovation of "Generative AI (AIGC) + Film and Television," planning to launch a series of short dramas based on Jingchu cultural and historical stories next year. The two sides will also co-incubate theatrical-level AIGC films, promoting the integration of AI creative tools into professional film and television production processes.
Powered by LightX2V inference framework to enable low‑cost, high-throughput video generation
HONG KONG, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SenseTime launched its Seko 2.0, a multi-episode drama generation agent tailored for short drama and motion comic creators. Supporting production up to 100-episode series, Seko 2.0 ensures consistency in characters, scenes, and props across episodes. It significantly boosts production efficiency, reducing comic drama production time by 80% to 90% compared to traditional methods.
Seko 2.0 is powered by SenseTime's open‑source LightX2V framework, the industry's first inference framework capable of real‑time video generation. This innovative framework allows for cost-effective and high-throughput video production.
Supporting 100-episode series generation
First launched in July 2025, Seko attracted over 100,000 creators within two months and its user base surpassed 200,000 in less than half a year, 30% of which were short drama creators and 20% comic drama creators.
The new Seko 2.0 further lowers the creative threshold and enables more efficient video production. Its key upgraded features include:
- A revamped User Interface (UI) with optimized visual presentation, delivering an immersive creative experience.
- Multi-episode generation capability with long-context management, supporting the creation up to 100 episodes.
- Intelligent Agent scheduling, enabling flexible association of characters, scenes, and props across episodes, with character makeup and styling adaptable to different scenarios.
Xu Li, Chairman of the Board and CEO of SenseTime, stated: "Seko will open a door for people, who have creative imagination, but lack of professional production capabilities, so they can truly enter the creative ecosystem and unleash their imagination." He added that, as AI capabilities continue to evolve, the quality of generated episodes will gradually move up, generating both refined "high-brow" works and popular "low-brow" content that can coexist harmoniously.
AI comic and short dramas have experienced an explosive growth in China. Data shows that the supply of comic dramas in mainland China surged at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 83% in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 works were produced with total revenues jumping by 12 times. Many individual creators and small teams have joined this creative trend, some even taking it as their second career.
Enabling multi-person lip-sync & audio-visual synchronization
Most existing AI video generation products on the market only support single-episode short films or clip production. To meet creators' urgent demand for high-quality, large-scale multi-episode production, Seko 2.0 achieves two core technology breakthroughs:
1) SekoIDX: Achieving character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot scenarios
Maintaining character consistency across episodes and shots has long been an industry challenge. Traditional generation methods often result in characters appearing as "copied and pasted" (lacking vividness) or "unrecognizable" when responding to new motion or expression promots. By introducing "negative reference images" in the high-noise phase of diffusion models, SekoIDX ensures character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot content while avoiding excessive similarity to reference images. It also maintains high stability when responding to commands for different expressions, poses, and scenes.
2) SekoTalk: Realizing multi-person lip-sync and natural audio-visual synchronization
Traditional digital human technology often suffers from inaccurate lip-sync in complex scenarios involving multi-language and multi-person interactions. As the industry's first solution supporting lip-sync for more than two people, SekoTalk achieves highly precise audio-visual synchronization from single-person to multi-person interactions through a series of innovative designs, whether for daily conversations, intense arguments, or group counting.
These underlying technology breakthroughs directly translate to a leap in productivity. Under the traditional workflow, a team would typically take over three months to complete 50 episodes. With Seko 2.0, the comic drama production cycle can be reduced by 80% to 90%. Seko's comprehensive features make it feasible for independent creators to produce videos in a "one-person crew" model.
- Explore SekoTalk, built on LightX2V and SenseTime's generation model, enabling multi‑person lip‑sync and natural audio‑visual synchronization for videos: http://sekotalk.com/
Adapting to domestic solutions
Multi-episode creation of AI short dramas and comic dramas involves a large number of shots. A single 5-second video requires generating nearly 100,000 tokens, and 10 to 20 shots can result in a total token demand of 1 to 2 million.
To address this challenge, SenseTime has developed Phased DMD Distillation technology, which can significantly reduce the overall cost of multi-episode generation. By combining phased distillation with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, it allows different models to specialize in different stages of the generation process, substantially improving overall model capability and efficiency without increasing inference costs.
SenseTime has also open-sourced LightX2V, the industry's first inference framework enabling real-time video generation. Through optimizations such as DiT distillation acceleration, lightweight VAE, and sparse attention, it achieves low-cost real-time video generation. LightX2V can generate a 5-second video on consumer-grade graphics cards in under 5 seconds, significantly outperforming Sora2, which takes several minutes. To date, it has accumulated over 5.3 million downloads and has gained widespread popularity among creators worldwide.
On domestic chip platforms, Seko can achieve generation effects comparable to international chip platforms in similar timeframes. International chip platforms can generate 1.25 seconds of video per second of operation, while domestic chip platforms generate 1.0625 seconds per second. With domestic chip performance improving and ecosystem maturing, this gap is expected to further narrow down.
In the future, SenseTime will also offer domestic solution options for Seko creators, ushering in a low-cost era of AI video creation with extreme cost-performance ratio.
Topping Douyin's AI short drama chart
In the comic and short drama market, Seko has successfully incubated a series of hit shows, including the live-action short drama "Wan Xin Ji", which topped Douyin's AI Short Drama Chart. Works such as "I Built a Doomsday Fortress on the Mountain Top" and "Yin Shen Lu" have also gained widespread attention.
In the high-quality film and television sector, Seko has officially reached a strategic partnership with Yangtze River Film Group, a leading enterprise in the film and television industry. The two parties will jointly explore the integrated innovation of "Generative AI (AIGC) + Film and Television," planning to launch a series of short dramas based on Jingchu cultural and historical stories next year. The two sides will also co-incubate theatrical-level AIGC films, promoting the integration of AI creative tools into professional film and television production processes.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
SenseTime Launches Seko 2.0 Drama Series Generation Platform
