News & Stories

Eight UGC-funded universities will launch a joint environmental campaign “UNIfy: Skip the Straw” on March 12 to reduce single-use plastic straws. The Campaign signifies the joint efforts of City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lingnan University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Education University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and The University of Hong Kong to reduce plastic waste. The universities will hold a “No Straw Week” or “No Straw Day” on their campuses during the week of March 12-16, where campus catering outlets will only offer straws when requested. Other activities include film screenings, zero waste markets and reusable straw giveaways. The universities have also pledged to introduce long-term measures including regular awareness campaigns and no straw days, or a campus-wide ban of plastic straws.

A research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) recently invented a new fusion-based technology which achieves remarkably improved accuracy to position people indoor, enabling novel smart location-based applications such as indoor navigation, location-based personalized recommendation, crowd analysis and people flow control.

In addition to government assurances, HKUST carries out different measures to deliver the best quality water for the HKUST community. Each campus water fountain is installed with filter and UV disinfection that removes particulates and kills bacteria.

While HKUST is renowned for its research and academic acumen, many do not know about its efforts to be one of the greenest universities in Hong Kong.  In the past year, HKUST has continued hard work to be an environmental champion, and have achieved much in this regard. Among the environmental milestones for this year are several community-driven initiatives. The HKUST Green Team, a 100% student and staff-driven initiative, launched a Lunch Boxes Go Green Campaign, encouraging the community to bring reusable containers when buying takeaway food. A strong response saw more than 2,500 disposable boxes saved.

Prof. Arthur LAU, Co-director of Environmental Management and Technology Program, was invited by MTR Corporation Ltd. to shoot an educational video clip on MTR's water-recycling measures.

Two new recycling programs were launched in the fall semester, Styrofoam and electronic and electrical waste recycling on campus.

According to Professor Brian Mak, Associate Professor in HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a recent survey indicated that Hong Kong is home to around 50,000 people who are either totally deaf or are hearing-impaired. However, the kind of support this community requires is not currently available. “The number of professional sign language interpreters [in Hong Kong] is low – only about 54 in total,” Professor Mak explained. For their final year project, three Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates decided to use the skills they had developed at HKUST to tackle this problem. The app developed by Ken Ka-wai Lai, Mary Ming-fong Leung and Kelvin Wai-chiu Yung translates Chinese sentences keyed into a phone into video sequences illustrating how to sign the words.

Our HKUST Library has been spending great effort in promoting sustainability through their operations.