Zhu Wanyi

HKAE TechTalk – Fast-Tracking the Northern Metropolis: Leveraging Advanced Materials and Novel Construction Technologies

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

October 20, 2026 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:00pm
The Civil Engineering and Development Department (CEDD) has been spearheading infrastructure construction and land supply initiatives to support Hong Kong’s sustainable growth. One of the pivotal projects led by CEDD is the Northern Metropolis Development (NMD), a strategic vehicle for advancing high-quality education, integrating I&T and industry, serving as a key growth engine to develop new quality productive forces for the city and deeper integration with the Greater Bay Area.

To transform Hong Kong into a world-class sustainable and resilient city, CEDD takes forward various inspiring ideas in practice through collaboration and partnership with academics and industrial practitioners. With the concerted efforts of all, such University-Government-Industry (UGI) collaborations have successfully harnessed emerging technologies and novel materials to produce new engineering solutions for application in the construction industry.

In order to fast-track NMD, CEDD is intensifying efforts through UGI collaborations in driving technological developments and strengthening its infrastructure delivery capabilities. While accelerating the delivery of NMD, CEDD remains committed to promoting urban-rural integration. The overarching goal is to create an environment ideal for living, working and travelling, marking a breakthrough in Hong Kong’s development.

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TechTalk – What and How can Nano Do for You?

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

August 10, 2026 (Thursday) 10:30am-11:30am
Over the last 28 years, our laboratory has focused on the designed chemical synthesis and assembly of uniform-sized nanocrystals and related nanomaterials, and their biomedical, energy and soft-electronic-device applications. Especially, we invented the “heat-up process”, a simple and reproducible method to produce large quantity of uniform-sized nanoparticles (Nano Lett. 2026, 26, 4525; JACS 2001, 123, 12798; Nat. Mater. 2004, 3, 891). We fabricated ultra-flexible and/or stretchable soft-electronic quantum-dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs). We reported a novel device design and fabrication method for 3D foldable quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) (Nat. Elec. 2021, 4, 671), and intrinsically-stretchable QLEDs (is-QLED) (Nat. Elec. 2024, 7, 365).
For the last decade, our group has also developed several synthetic methods to produce single-atom catalysts and nanocatalysts for photo-& electro-catalytic hydrogen production and utilization such as H2O2 electrosynthesis (Nat. Mater. 2024, 23, 552, Nat. Nano. 2023, 18, 754, Nat. Nano. 2025, 20, 1237).

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TechTalk – Data Intelligence of Large Language Models

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

June 18, 2026 (Thursday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
Database systems, which provide various operations for defining and querying data, enable large-scale AI systems and intelligent applications in various domains. Due to recent advances in large language models (LLMs), automating database operations through code generation has become increasingly attainable. This capability of having data intelligence in LLMs has given rise to a new paradigm—Data-Centric Code Generation (DCCG)—which aims to build systems that can automatically understand, manipulate, and reason over data.
To realize DCCG, I will discuss our team’s effort in building benchmarking systems, including BIRD-SQL, a large-scale Text-to-SQL benchmark on real databases, and SWE-SQL, which gauges the ability that an LLM resolves user SQL issues. These benchmarks, widely used in the industry, reveal hallucination and other issues faced by LLMs. To address these challenges, I will present our work in graph-aware reasoning, SQL correction, and multi-turn tabular data analysis. They aim to evolve LLMs from static code generators into autonomous, trustworthy agents, with data intelligence, that can understand and generate data-driven software systems.

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TechTalk – Robotics for Soft Materials

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

June 11, 2026 (Thursday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
The manufacturing industry faces serious challenges from aging populations, labor shortages, and environmental crises. Robotics enhanced with emerging AI technologies is expected to overcome these challenges by enabling automation of processes that have been difficult to automate with conventional robot technologies. While today’s industrial robots excel at manipulating rigid objects, labor-intensive processes involving soft materials—like garment manufacturing—remain difficult to automate. Soft materials are challenging to manipulate because their shape is unstable and depends on the surface they are in contact with. They are also affected by environmental factors that are difficult to estimate. This presentation briefly overviews robotics for soft materials and explores how AI and machine learning can address garment manufacturing challenges. Preliminary results are introduced, including fabric part manipulation, fixture-free 2D/3D sewing, high-speed edge sensing, bimanual texture alignment, dynamic motion planning, and garment flattening.

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TechTalk – Solar PV-X Technologies: New Frontiers Beyond Electricity

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

May 15, 2026 (Thursday) 11:30am-12:00nn
Photovoltaic (PV) panels are typically less than 20% efficient in delivering electricity from the Sun’s
energy. The efficiency losses are especially pronounced when PV panels are exposed to high
irradiance conditions on warm, sunny days, which lead to higher temperature operation. Of the
total amount of sunlight incident on PV panels, over 70% is lost to the environment as waste heat.
This loss has motivated the development of ‘hybrid’ PV-thermal (PV-T) collectors, which combine
PV cells with a contacting fluid. The fluid recovers waste heat from the cells, thus delivering a
potentially useful thermal output, while simultaneously cooling the cells and increasing their
electrical efficiency. Recently, a new concept that we refer to as multifunctional ‘PV-X’ collector
technology has emerged, in which secondary processes are integrated synergistically with the PV
cells, exploiting the available waste heat to perform additional functions directly within the collector.
In this talk, we will present conventional and advanced PV-T and PV-X collector concepts and
designs, along with their underlying operational principles. We will explore opportunities for further
developing these technologies and examine how new materials can drive improvements from the
component to the system level, while discussing the potential of integrating these technologies into
broader solar-energy systems capable of providing cooling, heating, power, fuels or clean water.

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HKAE TechTalk – From Trustworthy Systems to Trustworthy AI

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

May 19, 2026 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:00pm
Trustworthiness is a critical issue in artificial intelligence (AI), especially for real-world applications. It is impossible to deploy AI in the real world without its being trustworthy. However, the connotation and extension of AI trustworthiness are not entirely clear. There has not been a single definition that is accepted by all researchers. This talk starts from a brief recall of trustworthy systems in the literature and tries to understand any potential differences between classical trustworthy systems and modern-day trustworthy AI. It argues that AI ethics is a crucial part of trustworthy AI, which was not featured in classical trustworthy systems. The talk then presents a short summary of AI ethics and governance. It presents potential synergies among responsible AI (RAI), ESG and SDGs. It points out the challenges of AI governance because of the high complexity and multi-dimensional nature of ethical principles, e.g., transparency. Potential technical solutions will be mentioned, although not in any details. The talk ends with some concluding remarks.

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TechTalk – The West’s Fading Factory Floor

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

May 5, 2026 (Tuesday) 10:30am-11:30am
In this talk, I’ll walk you through my research on medical and industrial exoskeletons at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the development work at the two companies I founded in the United States. I’ll then focus on two main points.
First, the darker side of the overwhelming push across U.S. universities to encourage entrepreneurial work.
Second—and despite the first point—my next venture: how it took shape in my mind, influenced by the geographic and political landscape of West–East economic rivalries.
My goal is to create genuine motivation for some of you to join me, either as a co-founder or collaborator, to help bring this new venture to maturity.

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TechTalk – Exploring Diamond Membranes: From Fundamental Research to Industrial Innovation

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

May 21, 2026 (Thursday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
Diamond is celebrated not only as a precious gemstone but also for its exceptional physical and quantum properties—particularly when it contains atomic defects known as color centers. These defects enable diamond to exhibit unique quantum behaviors under ambient conditions, making it a promising material for cutting-edge technologies. However, large-scale production of ultrathin diamond membranes has historically been a significant challenge. In this talk, we will introduce a simple, scalable, and reliable edge–exfoliation method that utilizes common office sticky tape to produce flexible, transferable polycrystalline diamond membranes. This innovative technique facilitates the mass fabrication of large-area, sub-micrometer-thick, ultra-flat, and highly flexible diamond membranes compatible with standard manufacturing processes. The inherent flexibility of these membranes unlocks new possibilities in strain engineering, quantum sensing, and other applications that were previously difficult to realize. We will also explore their potential in semiconductors, quantum technologies, and beyond. This work paves the way for integrating diamond-based materials into next-generation devices, demonstrating the transformative potential of flexible diamond membranes.

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TechTalk – Cell Mechanics: from Disease Progression to Tissue Morphogenesis and Mechanotransduction

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk /

May 15, 2026 (Friday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
In this talk, Professor Yuan Lin will introduce their recent efforts in elucidating the role of mechanics/physics in different cellular and tissue-level processes. First, he will demonstrate that mechano-transduction via intercellular integrin complexes between the invading spheroid leader cell and mesothelial cells triggers and augments mesothelium apical constriction, which then leads to the shrinkage of mesothelial cell-cell junctions and eventually induces their rupture. At the same time, the growth of intercellular integrin adhesion causes wetting at the spheroid-mesothelium interface and induces deformation of spheroid cells, further facilitating its invasion into the mesothelium. After that, he will talk about how collective active contraction of cells and their interactions with outside dictate the pattern formation of tissues. Finally, he will show how tubulin family proteins (i.e., isotypes) regulate the microtubule accessibility for luminal proteins via the force-induced reversible protofilament separation, and ultimately mechanosensitive response of the cell.

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