Oversea speaker

November 27, 2025 (Thursday) 2:30pm-3:30pm
Some significant scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs are on the horizon. These developments can shake the foundations of industries, societies, and economies. This lecture will discuss some of these developments and elaborate on their impacts.

November 11, 2025 (Tuesday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
Smartphone cameras are advancing rapidly every year. While smarter smartphone photography can now produce stunning, eye-appealing photos, it can also be applied to clinical applications. In this Tech Talk, Professor Terence Leung will share their team’s experiences in using smartphones to (a) screen newborn babies for significant jaundice in Ghana and the UK, (b) screen pregnant women in India and young children in Ghana for anaemia, and (c) monitoring the deterioration (decompensation) of cirrhosis patients. Technical issues such as the effects of ambient lighting, differences in the spectral sensitives of colour sensors in different smartphones, and other environmental effects will also be discussed. The talk will end with a discussion on the future trend in smartphone imaging and its impacts on medical imaging.

October 14, 2025 (Thursday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
Improving indoor air requires addressing source control, ventilation, and filtration. This presentation explores filter performance from both aerosol science and building science perspectives with a focus on how theoretical and laboratory-tested filtration efficiencies translate to filtration performance in real buildings. The removal of particulate matter is only part of the filtration story. Filters also have a variety of secondary consequences including emissions of gas-phase compounds and complicated impacts on energy use. Some of these secondary effects may have a positive impact, including the ability of filters to offer insight on air quality through filter forensics, the analysis of the particles that accumulate on the filter. Several examples of filter forensics for disease surveillance, exposure assessment, and ambient air quality are used to illustrate the hidden value in used filters. The COVID-19 pandemic further increased the attention paid to central and portable filtration in buildings and this presentation assesses new challenges and opportunities that arise from this renewed focus.

September 5, 2025 (Friday) 4:00pm-5:00pm
Improving indoor air requires addressing source control, ventilation, and filtration. This presentation explores filter performance from both aerosol science and building science perspectives with a focus on how theoretical and laboratory-tested filtration efficiencies translate to filtration performance in real buildings. The removal of particulate matter is only part of the filtration story. Filters also have a variety of secondary consequences including emissions of gas-phase compounds and complicated impacts on energy use. Some of these secondary effects may have a positive impact, including the ability of filters to offer insight on air quality through filter forensics, the analysis of the particles that accumulate on the filter. Several examples of filter forensics for disease surveillance, exposure assessment, and ambient air quality are used to illustrate the hidden value in used filters. The COVID-19 pandemic further increased the attention paid to central and portable filtration in buildings and this presentation assesses new challenges and opportunities that arise from this renewed focus.

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.

April 12 2024 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm
This presentation explores machine learning (ML) integration with animal behavior studies and its transformative applications across neuroscience, human mobility analysis, and engineering. At the core of our research is the affinity between the complex behaviors observed in animal society and the predictive capabilities of ML algorithms.
In neuroscience, we introduce the development of robotic microscopes and feedback projections, offering insights into animal behavior at macroscopic and microscopic levels. This foundation supports our further applications in diverse fields such as retail analytics, human relationships estimation, and mobility service design. In the engineering domain, our work extends to preventive maintenance (condition-based maintenance: CBM) in manufacturing and transportation, drawing from the predictive nature of ML to foresee and mitigate equipment failures. Moreover, we introduce ML for digital twinning to create dynamic virtual models of physical systems.
This array of applications highlights the critical role of integrating computer vision and ML into problem-solving workflows across various production plants. This presentation emphasizes the essential need for interdisciplinary collaboration, bridging the gap between biologists, data scientists, and engineers.

April 5 2024 (Friday) 4:30-5:30pm
Unstructured documents often come with embedded structured data. Representing valuable and structured information as tables is popular in health, financial, and many domains. However, manual extraction of structured information from documents typically costs tremendous time and labor, motivating the need for a system for automating the process. After such tables have been extracted, the data can be used for a wide variety of tasks such as question answering and various “down-stream” analytics tasks. In this talk, we will discuss how to leverage ground breaking pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT, ChatGPT) to develop tools for automated table extraction from various types of documents. We will present different applications from cancer registry reporting, cancer care, and psychiatry hospitalization prediction.

February 2 2024 (Friday) 2:30-3:30pm
Neurological conditions affect one in six people, imposing significant health, economic and societal burden. Bioelectronic medicine aims to restore or replace neurological function with the help of implantable electronic devices. Unfortunately, significant technological limitations prohibit these devices from reaching patients at scale, as implants are bulky, require invasive implantation procedures, elicit a pronounced foreign body response, and show poor treatment specificity and off-target effects. Over the past decade, new devices made using methods from microelectronics industry have been shown to overcome these limitations. Recent literature provides powerful demonstrations of thin film implants that are miniaturised, ultra-conformal, stretchable, multiplexed, integrated with different sensors and actuators, bioresorbable, and minimally invasive. I will discuss the state-of-the-art of these new technologies and the barriers than need to be overcome to reach patients at scale.

Speaker: Academician C.C. Chan, Honorary Professor, The University of Hong Kong, Distinguished Chair Professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Academician, Chinese Academy of Engineering, Fellow, Royal Academy of Engineering   About the TechTalk We would like to extend our sincere gratitude and appreciation to Academician C.C. Chan for sharing with us two videos of his speech on …

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