Innovation Wing Two

The project is an integral part of a flagship research initiative being carried out under the auspices of the HKU Center for Water Technology and Policy. The Water Centre was jointly established by the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Social Sciences to conduct cutting-edge research on water science, technology and policy issues that pertain to the broader urban sustainability agenda. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the members of our inter-disciplinary project team. They come from the Department of Civil Engineering, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Politics and Public Administration and the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The introduction of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Reporting Guide (Guide) by HKEX in 2013, and the subsequent upgrade of the Guide’s reporting obligation to “comply or explain” in 2016, have significantly moved the dial for Hong Kong issuers’ ESG reporting. However, ESG reporting faces many bottlenecks, including data authenticity, consistency, and transparency. Professor Huang’s team developed an IoT- and blockchain-based platform to upgrade the ESG reporting industry.

The LiDAR Camera fusion captures 3D space in real-time, opening up the portal into the virtual world. The built model can be used in real scene games, virtual campus tour, metaverse, and more! However, existing products in the market are costly, and the working process is not only slow but also complicated.

Compared to current wearable devices that can only measure vital signals, PERfECT is able to detect molecular indicators in the body fluid for disease screening and monitoring. “HKU PERfECT” is the first wearable platform that can simultaneously address three challenges: 1. highly sensitive, 2. smallest and lightest and 3. energy efficient.

Undergraduate medical education has been severely affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. While lectures can be easily conducted online via Zoom, clinical bedside teachings, including training of history taking skills from patients, cannot be easily replaced. A novel chatbot mobile app for training of undergraduate medical students’ clinical history taking skills was developed.

MindPipe, the first 4D parallel training system for large DNN models, has the following objectives:
1. Greatly reducing load imbalance in GPU pipeline parallel stages; 2. Effectively resolving contention of the 3D parallel communication tasks; 3. Deterministically scheduling multiple subnets to be trained in supernet parallelism, a novel parallel dimension proposed by MindPipe; and 4. Automatic near-optimal 4D configuration of GPUs considering both DNN converging efficiency and GPU utilization.

Computer vision enables machines to “see”. The capability of machine vision based on cameras, however, is fundamentally limited to a certain field-of-view with good lighting conditions – they cannot see through any occlusions or in the dark.
Wireless sensing opens a new sense for machine perception to decipher the physical world, even in absolute darkness and through walls and obstacles.
It can capture human activities invisibly in a contactless and sensorless way.

The Law and Technology Centre, co-directed by Professor Kao, aims to advance research and provide public service in the interdisciplinary area of information technology and law. The current research focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into legal research and practice.

Optical Coherence Tomography is a spectrum-encoded, cross-sectional, and non-invasive imaging device. The future OCT would be able to image thicker samples more efficiently. Our novel and compact fiber laser has the potential to be used as a dual-comb source for more advanced imaging device.

Digital twins virtually represent an object and accurately replicate its performance in reality with low cost. Digital design framework generally consists of three parts, i.e., modelling, optimization and manufacturing. By adjustment of microstructures, the performance of products can be maneuvered to achieve various optimization targets.