Innovation Wing Two

HKAE TechTalk – Interdisciplinary Energy Transition for Carbon Neutrality

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

May 16, 2024 (Friday) 4:00-5:00pm
Transitioning to renewable energy and efficient energy systems is paramount for achieving carbon neutrality, necessitating a multidisciplinary approach. Energy research must encompass a wide array of factors, including temporal aspects, geographical considerations, and data analysis. This discussion delves into the complexities of energy transitions, illustrating their interconnectedness with the global energy landscape. Challenges such as integrating renewable energy sources, managing demand fluctuations, and overcoming research barriers are explored. By forging connections between energy and various sectors, comprehensive and sustainable solutions can be developed. A focus on interdisciplinary research is crucial for advancing future energy endeavors and addressing broader environmental imperatives.

TechTalk – Multiscale Robotics and Automation for Advanced Healthcare Applications

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

April 10, 2025 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
Advancements in biology and medicine necessitate enabling technologies for the manipulation and characterization of tissues, single cells, and even sub-cellular structures. Over the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the area of micro and medical robotics for biomedical applications such as single-cell manipulation and minimally invasive surgery. This talk will introduce a new search and detection method for automatically locating end-effector tips; vision-based contact detection algorithms, and microrobotic manipulation techniques. Furthermore, this talk will present microrobotic systems integrating these techniques for microinjection, along with the introduction of an inner actuated microrobot specially designed for minimally invasive medical procedures. The new technology has the potential to reshape cardiovascular drug testing and revolutionize the automated cryopreservation of reproductive cells in IVF clinics. Future research directions including augmented reality-assisted surgery and personalized healthcare will also be discussed.

TechTalk – Speeding Up Fairness: The Science of Fast Convergence in Markets and Graphs

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

April 3, 2025 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
Achieving fairness in resource allocation can be modeled as a graph-based optimization problem, with many efficient algorithms available. This talk explores the connection between market equilibrium and graph density decomposition, showing how fast convergence can be achieved in large-scale systems. We present a unified framework linking hypergraph density decomposition and Fisher market equilibrium through locally verifiable optimality conditions. This symmetry allows repurposing algorithms between domains, significantly accelerating convergence.
We focus on iterative gradient-based methods, including the iterative proportional response process and its momentum-enhanced extensions. Our novel exponential momentum approach refines traditional techniques, delivering near-optimal solutions in distributed settings. Empirical results show these methods outperform existing algorithms, achieving speedups by several orders of magnitude in large-scale graphs.
By integrating graph theory, market dynamics, and optimization, this talk offers new insights into efficient computation to achieve fairness in networked systems. These methods deepen our understanding of algorithmic principles and open new applications in algorithm design, social networks, and economic modeling.

HKAE TechTalk – Nanotechnology for Three-Dimensional Biosensors, Terahertz Devices, and Meta-Devices

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

March 18, 2024 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:00pm
Recent advancements in nanotechnology have enabled the creation of diverse nanostructures, which are integral to high-performance biosensors, terahertz (THz) devices, and meta-devices. Nanoimprint technology, when combined with precise dry etching techniques, facilitates the rapid production of three-dimensional (3D) nanodevices with high uniformity and precisely controlled dimensions across large areas.
In this presentation, we will showcase several applications of these technologies:
1. 3D Biomimetic Platforms and Plasmonic Biosensors to control and monitor cells and biomolecules with exceptional sensitivity.
2. High-Frequency Terahertz (THz) Lenses and Antennas utilizing curved or meta surfaces to enhance functionality and performance.
3. Multi-Layered Meta Surfaces with Twist Angles to achieve chiral magic angles for advanced light manipulation.

TechTalk – Urban Water Security and Smart Management in a Changing World: Case Study in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

February 24, 2025 (Monday) 10:30-11:30pm
Under the impact of global climate change, tremendous land use land cover changes, and extensive human interventions, urban areas face grand challenges in water security and green development. Ensuring urban water security requires ensuring quality and quantity of drinking water, sanitation, human well-being, water productivity, socio-economic values, ecosystems and environmental health, and mitigating water-related hazards. To resolve urban water security-related issues, a systematic framework by linking natural and social water cycles is urgently needed. Xia proposed the “Urban Water System, version 5.0” featuring “water quantity-quality-ecology” system approach by linking urban systems with natural river basin systems and applied it to the smart basin management, flash flood forecasting, and disaster mitigation. Besides, Xia led the development of the “Yangtze River Simulator,” which integrates sky-to-ground monitoring and comprehensive numerical simulation of hydrological-related processes in the Yangtze River Basin to foster the early warning and decision making of water security and water governance.

HKAE TechTalk – Breakthroughs from ChatGPT to DeepSeek and Higher Education Revolution

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

February 28, 2024 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:00pm
The rapid development of generative AI has ignited a new wave of technological innovations. Breakthroughs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek are opening doors to democratize and accelerate adoption across various industries and countries. This new era presents both challenges and opportunities for institutions of higher education, such as Lingnan University, where research and creativity are integral to daily life. The university acknowledges that knowledge is dynamic and evolving, not static, and disruptive technologies can displace existing professions while creating new ones.
Several open questions to be addressed include:
• Breakthroughs from ChatGPT to DeepSeek
• How will generative AI affect the curriculum?
• What education subjects would be sustained or diminished?
• How can we help students enhance critical thinking skills with generative AI?
• How does the digital revolution affect higher education in terms of skills-based and holistic education?

TechTalk – AI-Assisted Community Legal Information Access

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

February 20, 2025 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
In the contemporary era, legal information, encompassing court judgments and legislation, is generally accessible online in numerous countries. However, the online availability of this information does not necessarily equate to effective public access to legal knowledge. It presents significant challenges for individuals without legal expertise to acquire legal knowledge due to two primary reasons. Firstly, the online content predominantly consists of primary legal sources, such as cases and statutes, which are typically written in formal legal terminology that can be challenging for the general public to comprehend. Secondly, the public may lack knowledge of the applicable legal principles in their specific legal situations. Given the vast number of documents, it becomes arduous for users to identify the relevant legal sources when seeking solutions to their legal challenges. In this presentation, we will demonstrate several AI tools that we have integrated into our online legal information platforms, specifically HKLII and CLIC. We will elucidate how these tools facilitate enhanced public access to legal information.

TechTalk – A Healthy Building is A Prerequisite and Mandatory for Achieving Sustainable Growth

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

January 7, 2025 (Tuesday) 2:30-3:30pm
The Healthy Buildings term was defined more than 40 years ago. It is relevant to ask whether it is still valid today in the present form and whether it needs any revisions and supplements, considering many changes and new challenges. This presentation will discuss the original definition and outline these new challenges, for example, resilience, monitoring, economic implications, and consequences of climate change and the pandemic risk. Some solutions will be presented with support from new research studies; the potential risks of the undertakings will also be discussed. One crucial issue discussed will be the inclusion of the need for healthy buildings in the decarbonization processes as an essential element of achieving sustainable development.

TechTalk – Thermal Insulation in Materials for Efficient Energy Conversion

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

December 19, 2024 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
To enhance the thermoelectric conversion efficiency of materials, the thermal conduction needs to be suppressed, and the lattice dynamics and the thermal transport mechanisms must be better understood. Lattice thermal conduction of conventional solids is dominated by phonon propagation; however, diffuson-like thermal transport can become predominant in materials with ultralow thermal conductivity. New strategies for a simultaneous suppression of both propagative and diffusive thermal transports will be discussed in this talk based on state-of-the-art theories. Zintl compounds were recently found to exhibit exceptional thermoelectric properties. A thorough experimental study of the thermoelectric transport and carrier properties of Zintl compounds will be discussed. It will be shown that a high figure of merit over a broad temperature range can be realized through the suppression of the intrinsic carrier excitation.

TechTalk – Optimizing Distributed Large Model Training in AI Clouds

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

December 12, 2024 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
Distributed training using a large number of devices has been widely adopted for learning large deep learning models. Improving distributed training efficiency is critical for time, resource and energy consumption of large model learning. In this talk, I will introduce recent research works in my group on optimizing distributed training parallelisms for effective training acceleration and maximal resource utilization. Especially, we have designed optimized strategies and systems for operator sharding, computation and communication scheduling for SPMD parallelism (e.g., in Mixture-of-Experts model training) in both homogeneous and heterogeneous AI clusters, as well as dynamic micro-batching and pipelining to tackle sequence length variation in multi-task model training (e.g., Large Language Model training).