November 3 2023 (Friday) 9:00am -12:30pm
This Special TechTalk is the collaborative event with Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong. The theme of the symposium is about Sustainable Environment for the Greater Bay Area. Experts in this field from various universities and institutes are joined together to share their insight.
October 18 2023 (Wednesday) 9:35-11:05 am & October 19 2023 (Thursday) 3:00-4:40 pm
This Special TechTalk is fully supported by GPPS Hong Kong23 (Global Power & Propulsion Society). All are welcome to join two sessions of plenary lectures with the topics of Advanced Computing and Future Energy on 18th October (Wednesday) and 19th October (Thursday) respectively.
October 12 2023 (Thursday) 3-4pm
To avoid catastrophic consequences of climate change, our current carbon-emitting energy infrastructure needs to be replaced with an energy system free from atmospheric carbon emissions. The enormous scale of this energy transition requires multiple energy sources to be developed, including carbon-free wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear as well as fossil-fuel-based systems where the carbon dioxide from the waste stream is captured and stored securely in deep subsurface geologic formations, in a technology known as Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS. Subsurface geologic formations are also likely to be used to provide short-term storage for energy-carrying fluids like hydrogen and natural gas, making the subsurface environment critical to the energy transition. In this talk, I will discuss practical computational approaches to analyze geological storage systems as well as economic and political issues associated with CCS. I will also briefly discuss basic climate change facts, as part of a proposed general curriculum for Environmental Literacy.
August 28, 2023 (Monday) 2-3pm
Thermodynamics is a science concerning the state of a system, whether it is stable, metastable, or unstable. Its derivatives to natural variables give fundamental physico-chemical properties of the system. It is historically divided into four categories: equilibrium thermodynamics by Gibbs, statistical thermodynamics by Gibbs and Landau, irreversible thermodynamics by Onsager and Prigogine, and quantum mechanics. The development of density function theory (DFT) enabled the quantitative prediction of properties of the ground state of a system from quantum mechanics. Their integration into predictive theories will be discussed in this presentation along with future perspectives. It will be shown that the zentropy theory combines the bottom-up DFT predictions with the revised top-down statistical thermodynamics, while the theory of cross phenomena keeps the entropy production due to irreversible processes in the combine law of thermodynamics to revise the Onsager flux equations. The zentropy theory is capable of quantitatively predicting free energy landscape, singularity and emergent divergences of properties at critical point free of parameters, while the theory of cross phenomena can predict the coefficients of internal processes between non-conjugate variables.
August 3, 2023 (Thursday) 4:30-5:30pm
Mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) derived from the epiblast contribute to the somatic lineages and the germline upon reintroduction to the blastocyst but are excluded from the extraembryonic tissues in the placenta that are derived from the trophectoderm (TE) and the primitive endoderm (PrE). By inhibiting signal pathways implicated in the earliest embryo development, we established cultures of mouse expanded potential stem cells (EPSCs) from individual 4-cell and 8-cell blastomeres, by direct conversion of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and through reprogramming somatic cells. Bona fide trophoblast stem cell (TSC) lines, extra-embryonic endoderm stem (XEN) cells, and ESCs could be directly derived from EPSCs in vitro. The knowledge of mouse EPSCs has enabled the establishment of EPSCs of human, pig, bovine and additional mammalian species. EPSCs of these species share similar molecular features and developmental potentials. They are genetically and epigenetically stable, can be maintained in homogenous long-term cultures and permit efficient precision and complex genome editing. EPSCs thus provide new tools for studying normal development and open up new avenues for translational research in biotechnology, agriculture, and regenerative medicine. For example, we find that early syncytiotrophoblasts produced from human TSCs are highly susceptible to coronavirus infection. This finding has enabled the development of a new stem cell-based antiviral drug discovery technology. I will discuss our thoughts on collaborations with engineering colleagues.
The Longyou Caves represent an important historical site in China that has undergone periodic water level changes over several centuries. The ground water flow through the intact rock and fractures is an important factor in the geotechnical assessment of the site. The Environmental Geomechanics Laboratory at McGill University has focused on the development of innovative theoretical approaches and experimental facilities for wide range of rocks including Indiana Limestone, the Cobourg Limestone, the Vermont Granite and the Lac du Bonnet Granite, using both steady state and transient techniques. In this Teck Talk, Professor Selvadurai will present a range of experimental techniques, their theoretical interpretations that can be used to estimate of fluid transport processes through intact rocks that can be described by Darcy’s law. The theoretical and experimental techniques are used to determine the intact permeability of Longyou claystone recovered from the site.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been revolutionizing numerous fields within science and engineering, giving rise to “AI for Science” – a new paradigm for both academia and industry. In this seminar, we will explore how AI algorithms and tools empower researchers to tackle intricate scientific challenges, strengthen collaboration, and expedite the discovery process. We will also envision the future of this field in the era of cloud-native infrastructures and large language models, emphasizing the crucial role of platform engineering in nurturing the growth and development of the entire scientific community. Lastly, we will provide examples to illustrate the potential appearance of such platforms and discuss the path towards their realization.
The design of optimal auctions for revenue maximization is a central topic in Economics. Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bidders’ values are drawn from a known distribution. In reality, the source of such prior information is really past data. Cole and Roughgarden (2014) modeled past data as i.i.d. samples from the value distribution and asked: How many samples are sufficient/necessary to learn a near optimal auction? This TechTalk will introduce a unified theory that yields sample-efficient algorithms with optimal sample complexity for auctions with homogeneous goods, and state-of-the-art sample complexity for auctions with heterogeneous goods. Unlike conventional statistical learning theory which focuses on the complexity of hypothesis classes, our new theory relies on the simplicity of data distributions and a monotonicity property of these problems.
The Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) is the combination of Artificial intelligence (AI) with the Internet of things (IoT) to enable autonomous decision-making, data analytics, and system optimization. AIoT for smart cities allows the collection of enormous sensor data for a better understanding of the environment, human behaviors, and city operations, which leads to more efficient resource management and promotes a sustainable and healthier society. The Smart Water Auditing project aims to use IoT and machine learning to provide insights into how water is being used in the households of Hong Kong to reduce the consumption of water and raise awareness of people’s water consumption habits. Our talk will present our design workflow, IoT infrastructures, machine learning algorithms, and experimentation for water end-use disaggregation in Hong Kong.
Soils are vital for several sectors of the economy: transportation, energy, water, food security, historical heritage. Soils deteriorate over time, in response to cyclic processes (seasonal effects) and extreme events (from heatwaves to heavy rainfall). Mitigation is frequently based on intrusive and heavy engineering solutions. In this Tech Talk, Dr. Sérgio Lourenço will focus on how soil properties can be controlled or tuned as needed. Recent advances which borrow on ideas from allied fields, will be presented, from bioengineering to surfaces and interfaces. The potential of adaptable, sensing and self-healing soils as the way forward, will be discussed.