TechTalk

TechTalk – To See a World in a Grain of Sand: A Geotechnical Researcher’s Perspective

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Many large earth structures (e.g. slopes, dams, and artificial islands) are made up of sand or sandy soil. The stability of these structures is a major concern of the public as well as the professional. The bitter memories of the deadly slope failures in Hong Kong in 1972 remind us of the importance of proper stability evaluation. The difficulty in predicting the mechanical behavior of sand and sandy soil mainly comes from the granular nature of these materials. A sand or sandy soil is an assembly of numerous small grains of varying size, shape and even mineral composition. It can exist over a spectrum of states that corresponds to a variety of responses, ranging from fluid-like flow to solid-like strain hardening. The groundwater brings additional difficulty and uncertainty. This talk will present some results and findings yielded from our long-term research endeavor at HKU, which is aimed to advance scientific understanding of the complex behaviors of granular earth materials and thereby provide better engineering solutions. Focus will be placed on the fascinating roles played by the small constituent particles. The significance of these findings to engineering practice will be open to discussion.

Young Scholar TechTalk – Cyber-Physical Spare Parts Intralogistics System for Aviation MRO

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Spare parts management is a vital supporting function in aviation Maintenance, Repair,and Overhaul (MRO). Spare parts intralogistics (SPI), the operational perspective of spare parts management, significantly affects performance of MRO activities. This study proposes Cyber-Physical Spare Parts Intralogistics System (CPSPIS) to address the synchronization problems associated with the SPI business process and SPI resources. The proposed system applies Internet-of-Things technologies and unified representations to provide resources and operations traceability and visibility. Further, CPSPIS contributes several services with self-X abilities for real-time synchronization throughout the SPI process. In addition, CPSPIS develops applications and visualization tools for real-time cooperation between execution and decision-making. Finally, this study conducts a real-life case study in one of the largest aviation MRO organizations in Hong Kong, and discusses the quantitative and qualitative improvements of CPSPIS.

TechTalk – Causes and Effects in the Microscopic World

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Identifying cause-effect relations is a fundamental primitive in a variety of areas of science and technology. The identification of causal relations is generally accomplished through statistical trials where alternative hypotheses about the causal relations are tested against each other. Traditionally, such trials have been based on classical statistics. But while classical statistics effectively describes the behavior of macroscopic variables, it becomes inadequate at the microscopic scale, described by quantum mechanics, where a richer spectrum of causal relations is accessible. In the past years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of causal relations among quantum variables. In this talk, Professor Giulio Chiribella will show that the counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics can be turned to our advantage, providing speed-ups in the identification of causal relations. These speed-ups have applications to the design of automated quantum machines and new quantum communication protocols.

TechTalk – Managing Urban Rainwater with Nature-based Solutions

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Engineers traditionally construct networks of drains and pipes to efficiently divert rainwater away from urban areas. However, such conventional approaches do not focus on addressing environmental issues caused by urbanization, such as water quality degradation and reduced groundwater recharge. Nature-based solutions (NBS) are urban rainwater management approaches that support the natural cycle of water and utilize ecosystems’ functions. Commonly used NBS include bioretention cells, porous pavements, and river hyporheic restoration measures. NBS can simultaneously provide multiple benefits in addition to rainwater quantity and quality management, such as promoting biodiversity, increasing aesthetic values, and reducing urban heat island effects. In this TechTalk, Dr. Chui will introduce some NBS and discuss the opportunities and challenges of implementing them in Hong Kong.

TechTalk Panel Discussion on Recruitment of HK Payload Specialists

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

This TechTalk panel discussion will first brief the participants on the basic information on the exciting National Manned Space Programme Recruitment of Payloads Specialists in HKSAR. This will be followed up by panel discussion on overseas experience of payload specialists and potential aerospace experiment ideas.
More information about the programme can be found in https://www.itib.gov.hk/en/psrecruitment/.

TechTalk – Wearable Assistive Robots for Aging Society

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

A rapidly aging population is one of the grand challenges facing the society. It is estimated that by 2050, the global population of people aged 65 or older will reach 1.6 billion. This is a major difficulty that many elders are experiencing severe limitations in mobility and manipulability in their daily lives, resulting in tremendous social and economic challenges. This talk will discuss a User-Centric Co-Creation (UC³) approach to develop intelligent robotic systems to assist mobility and manipulability as well as prevent falls. The UC³ methodology lays down a theoretical foundation for multi-disciplinary approach to the development of personalized wearable assistive systems. It will pave a new avenue to advance the ergonomics and gerontechnology beyond current horizons.

TechTalk – Autonomous Excavation: Manipulation and Perception of Granular Materials

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Autonomous excavators are an essential part of the goal of “building the robots that build the world”. One unique problem in autonomous excavation is how to deal with the granular materials like soils and sands, which is seldom studied in robotics. In this talk, Dr. Pan will present his team’s recent work about how to achieve efficient manipulation of soils by optimizing the trajectory of the excavator’s bucket, and how to enable the excavator to be aware of the objects buried in the soils by using a proximity sensing mechanism based on jamming in granular materials.

TechTalk – Micro-robots Powered by Stimuli-responsive Materials

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

Conventional mechatronic, hydraulic and pneumatic motors and actuators are used for large-scale robots from ≥10 cm to the human size. At the other, nanometric end of the length scale, nano-robots are powered by molecular motors. However, a number of applications in compact environments require robotic devices in the size range of 10 µm to 10 mm, but these are too small to be powered by the conventional mechatronic systems, and too large for molecular motors. Such a length scale ideally suits a few types of high-performance stimuli-responsive actuating materials that are emerging out of a very active research field in the past two decades, with examples including shape-memory polymers and metals, nanoporous noble metals, reactive polymers and liquid-crystal elastomers, carbon-based materials and transitional metal oxides. In addition to high actuating power densities, some of these materials also offer built-in sensory functions such as resistivity responses to mechanical, heat and humidity changes in the environment, and even energy generation capabilities. Integration of these materials and their signal flows in compact designs thus poses a novel strategy for robotics at the micro length scale. This talk will review some recent progress in this field.

Young Scholar TechTalk – Subgraph Federated Learning with Missing Neighbor Generation

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

In computer science, a graph is a network modeling objects and their unique interactions. The graph learning model is a specialized machine learning model that learns on graphs. Similar to traditional machine learning models, a well-performed graph learning model can capture the global data distribution with sufficient and unbiased training data. However, in a distributed subgraph system, most data owners only possess small amounts of the data (small subgraphs) in their local systems and can have unpredictable biases.
In this talk, the speaker will introduce this novel yet realistic setting – subgraph federated learning, which aims to let distributed data owners collaboratively train a powerful and generalized graph learning model without directly sharing their subgraphs. Towards this setting, two major techniques are proposed by the research team. (1) FedSage, which trains a GraphSage model based on FedAvg to integrate node features, link structures, and task labels on multiple local subgraphs; (2) FedSage+, which trains a missing neighbor generator along FedSage to deal with missing links across local subgraphs. Empirical results and theoretical analysis of proposed models respectively demonstrate the effectiveness and prove the generalization ability.

TechTalk – Cyber-Physical Internet (CPI) for Cross-Border Logistics of Manufactured Products

Innovation Wing Two, TechTalk / By

The vision of “Cyber-Physical Internet (CPI)” is to establish a new paradigm for sending and receiving manufactured goods just like sending and receiving instant messages over the internet using online chatting platforms. Four innovations are critical to achieve this ultimate vision: (1) digitization architecture for entangling the flows of information and materials into one flow of cyber-physical objects for manufacturing and logistics operations; (2) network services for configuring local aera network (LAN), wide area network (WAN) and catchment area network (CAN); (3) value mechanisms to motivate and facilitate participation and collaboration between multiple stakeholders including shippers, carriers, forwarders; and (4) decision analytics for synchronized logistics planning, scheduling and execution. These innovations are based upon some fundamental breakthroughs of CPI routers and TCP/PIP protocols that are yet to be developed.