Innovation Wing Two

HKAES TechTalk – Living with Climate Extremes – Hong Kong Perspective

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

January 23 2024 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:00pm
Hong Kong has a sub-tropical climate and wide variety of weather. Different extreme weather events, including tropical cyclone, heavy rain, and extreme temperatures, can affect Hong Kong and result in significant impacts to the society. Looking into the future, against the background of climate change and local urbanization, Hong Kong will expect even warmer climate, more variable rainfall, more intense typhoons, and a sea level that keeps rising in the coming centuries. This may affect the frequency and severity of various extreme weather and increase the risk of related weather hazards. This presentation will review different kinds of high impact extreme weather in Hong Kong and their past trend and future projection. Moreover, a brief overview on the concept of climate risk management will be shared.

TechTalk – HKU’s Contributions to Landslide Hazard Mitigation in Hong Kong

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

February 1 2024 (Thursday) 3:00-4:00pm
Hong Kong, renowned as one of the most densely populated territories globally, grapples with its hilly terrain and limited flat land, resulting in numerous buildings constructed on slopes or adjacent to large cut slopes. This situation poses a grave risk as landslides could tragically claim multiple lives. To address this critical issue, slope stabilization plays a crucial role in mitigating the landslide hazard. In this TechTalk, the pioneering work of Professor Peter Lumb on slope stability will be reviewed. The development and validation of soil nailing as an effective measure for slope stabilization will also be described.

A Self-rotating, Single-actuated UAV with Extended Sensor Field of View for Autonomous Navigation

Innovation Wing Two, Third exhibition / By

The UAV is named Powered-flying Ultra-underactuated LiDAR-sensing Aerial Robot (PULSAR), whose motion in three-dimensional space is controlled by only a single actuator (i.e., motor). The single actuator design can naturally cause self-rotation motion of the UAV body, obviously extending the field of view (FoV) of the onboard LiDAR sensor. Furthermore, it also effectively reduces the energy loss of the propulsion system, allowing PULSAR to save 26.7% of energy consumption compared to a benchmarked quadrotor UAV. Utilizing the extended FoV and onboard computing resource, PULSAR can perform autonomous navigation in unknown environments and detect both static and dynamic obstacles in panoramic views without using any external instruments. PULSAR has large FoV, high flight efficiency, and autonomous navigation ability, which are all beneficial for the environmental observation and information collection. Therefore, it can be used in various applications, such as environment surveying, search and rescue, terrain mapping, and automatic 3D reconstruction.

TechTalk – Filtration Solutions for Sustainable Environment

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

January 30 2023 (Tuesday) 4:00-5:30pm
We are developing filtration technologies to benefit sustainable environment. The Center for Filtration Research (CFR) at the University of Minnesota, collaborating with 20 leading international filtration manufacturers and end users, was established to find filtration solutions to mitigate PM2.5 and other environmental pollutants. There are more than 15 on-going fundamental and applied research projects on air, gas and liquid filtration. Five projects will be presented: 1. reduction of aerosol concentration in classrooms to prevent virus transmissions; 2. electret and nanofiber media to improve filtration performance; 3. indoor air cleaning using gas purifiers, ionizers, and UV-C; 4. real-time image detection of airborne biological particles; 5. temperature resistant nano-scale membrane for enhanced ceramic wall-flow filter performance. Large scale air cleaning towers are established in Xi’an and Yancheng in China to mitigate urban air PM2.5and CO2 (Yancheng) with two additional towers in Delhi, India. All these research and development activities are helping to improve sustainable environment.

TechTalk – Artificial Intelligence for Structural Design, Simulation and Health Monitoring

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

December 14 2023 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
Structural engineering community require the experience of experts in design, simulation and structural health monitoring (SHM) of existing structures. Currently, the training process of structural engineers may take more than 10 years from undergraduate to expert. The economic design currently relies on the experience of engineers, which may not reach the optimized design outcome. In addition, high-fidelity simulation and SHM are still challenging and practical applications of the nonlinear structural simulation and SHM are mostly limited to researchers, instead of practical engineers. Conventional structural engineering widely adopts finite element solvers based on CPUs, which may be time consuming. The computing resources of GPU accelerators and GPU-based supercomputers cannot be fully utilized due to the lack of GPU-based simulation platforms.

The project develops deep-learning-based intelligent structural design, simulation and structural health monitoring platform. For structural design, dataset is collected for structural design input parameters and structural design drawings, the generative models are learned to generate preliminary structural design drawings of buildings and bridges. For structural simulation, physics-informed neural networks are developed to replicate the spatial discretization and temporal discretization of conventional finite element solvers. For SHM, the state-of-the-art neural operator is trained on finite element simulation dataset of vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) system and fine-tuned on experimental dataset to infer the damage distribution field based on structural response field. The project can inspire the undergraduate and graduate students to learn more about the challenges and future developments of structural engineering.

TechTalk – Nanomaterials-based Soft Human-centric Optoelectronics

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

December 13 2023 (Wednesday) 3:30-4:30pm
Although recent research efforts in material development, device designs, and fabrication strategies have resulted in meaningful progresses to the goal of the human-centric optoelectronics, significant challenges still exist toward high-performance soft light emitting devices and curved photodetector arrays. In this talk, material assembly and fabrication strategies for the soft human-centric optoelectronics will be presented. First, recent processes in flexible, foldable, and stretchable quantum-dot light emitting diodes (QLEDs) will be presented. Technologies for high-resolution quantum dot patterning as well as passive matrix array of QLEDs with unconventional form factors will be explained. After that, wide FoV, miniaturized module-size, minimal optical-aberration, high-sensitivity, and deep depth-of-field artificial vision systems inspired from aquatic animal eyes will be presented. Unique stretchable image sensors whose image planes are well matched to the single-lens-based optical system enable such artificial visions. More recent progresses in the bio-inspired artificial visions with amphibious imaging and light-balancing capabilities will be also explained. These deformable QLEDs and bio-inspired artificial visions are expected to provide new opportunities for the advanced mobile electronics and robotics.

HKAES TechTalk – Hong Kong’s Climate Action Plan 2050

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

The Hong Kong Government issued the “Climate Action Plan 2050” in October 2021. This blueprint sets out four decarbonisation strategies : (1) net-zero electricity generation; (2) energy saving and green buildings; (3) green transport and (4) waste reduction. The plan provided a clear timeline to reduce total carbon emissions by half before 2035 from the 2005 level and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050.

TechTalk – 3D Functional Mesosystems: From Neural Interfaces to Environmental Monitors

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

December 13 2023 (Wednesday) 4:30-5:30pm
Complex, three dimensional (3D) micro/nanostructures in biology provide sophisticated, essential functions in even the most basic forms of life. Compelling opportunities exist for analogous 3D structures in man-made devices, but existing design options are highly constrained by comparatively primitive capabilities in fabrication and growth. Recent advances in mechanical engineering and materials science provide broad access to diverse, highly engineered classes of 3D architectures, with characteristic dimensions that range from nanometers to centimeters and areas that span square centimeters or more. The approach relies on geometric transformation of preformed two dimensional (2D) precursor micro/nanostructures and/or devices into extended 3D layouts by controlled processes of substrate-induced compressive buckling, where the bonding configurations, thickness distributions and other parameters control the final configurations. This talk reviews the key concepts and focuses on the most recent developments with example applications in areas ranging from mesoscale microfluidic/electronic networks as neural interfaces, to bio-inspired microfliers as environmental sensing platforms.

TechTalk – Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason: How a Vision for Ubiquitous Computing Can Be Reconciled to Have Better Impact

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

November 27 2023 (Monday) 4:00-5:00pm
Professor Gregory Abowd have been speaking and writing about the idea of an Internet of Materials (IoM) for nearly a decade. It started as a way to rethink Mark Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing in a more modern context, with the same hopeful zeal that Weiser presented in his writings from the late 1980s and early 1990’s. Professor Abowd will summarize how that re-interpretation has inspired his work, and the work of a growing community, for nearly a decade. From those involved in the fundamental understanding of computation to those involved in the practical development and deployment of computation, the future seems bright. We are moving towards a world of increased ubiquity of computation. There appears to be no end in sight for the increased ubiquity of all things computational. From a technical perspective, this is wonderful. More recently, professor Abowd have been forced to think about this vision through a different lens. How we justify any new vision of a technological future must be better grounded in the human motivation and potential impact. After explaining the “successes” of IoM, he will explain why he has fallen far short of a compelling motivation. But there are more compelling motivations, having to do with health, usable security and privacy, and, most importantly, sustainability. We MUST begin questioning a lot of the assumptions on how to make, operate, and dispose of computational objects. IoM is no longer a journey for a hopeful “visionary” to play out his fanciful predictions for the future. It is a mandate to address the fundamental hazards of our current trajectory towards ubiquitous computing.