News & Stories

Known for her outstanding achievements in artificial intelligence, Professor Pascale FUNG’s contributions go beyond her research breakthroughs and the building of intelligent systems. Having been teaching at HKUST for 24 years, Prof. Fung is also a female role model. This article is an exchange of views between a female engineering student and an AI expert about their upbringing as well as female perspective in engineering and life pursuit. As an engineering undergraduate myself, I was lucky enough to speak to Prof. Fung, which I never had a chance before. I was a little nervous while waiting for her for the interview. But when Prof. Fung walked into the room, I was amazed by her strong sense of enthusiasm and more importantly, confidence. I instantly knew that I was going to learn so much from her.

Research shows growing need for sustainability focus in Belt and Road Initiative projects in ASEAN. Chinese companies see diverse strengths of ASEAN market and collaboration the key for success.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 is a global public health challenge. To prevent the escalation of its transmission, China locked down one-third of its cities and strictly restricted personal mobility and economic activities. Using timely and comprehensive air quality data in China, we show that these counter-COVID-19 measures led to a remarkable improvement in air quality. Within weeks, the Air Quality Index and PM2.5 concentrations were brought down by 25%. The effects are larger in colder, richer, and more industrialized cities. We estimate that such improvement would avert 24,000 to 36,000 premature deaths from air pollution on a monthly basis.

President Prof. Wei SHYY contributed an article to the World Economic Forum talking about the collaborative efforts made by HKUST and its fellow allies to fight Covid-19. Below is the full article. With the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) sweeping across continents and affecting many millions, health authorities, policy-makers and scientists, innovators around the world are racing to invent ways to contain the further spread of the virus. It is our unwavering belief that universities are – and should always be – contributing to this collective fight against this and future severe and potentially long-lasting public health crises.

HKUST IEMS Thought Leadership Briefs No. 36

The United States maintains it has the upper hand being the bigger "buyer" in the relationship, while the Chinese argue the goods of lower costs it exports are doing a big favor to US consumers, who would ultimately suffer if the costs of such goods continue to rise because of tariffs. While China is busy fighting the trade war externally, Beijing is concurrently trying to improve the efficiency of the economy to make it more robust and resilient in such difficult times. An often-overlooked feature of Sino-US trade imbalances is that although Beijing runs up huge trade surpluses in the manufacturing sector, it has large deficits in the service sector. These supply and demand mismatches suggest that there may exist inefficient misallocations in the Chinese economy. Economic efficiency is achieved when factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to most productive firms or sectors with the highest demand.

In today’s workplace where many employers favor technical know-how over emotional aptitude, soft skills seem to be less desirable but for Professor Kellee TSAI, Dean of HKUST’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS), creativity is deemed to be an essential skill for the future of work. The world is moving toward automation at speed, today’s cutting edge technology and patents may become obsolete within years, while skills like critical thinking and creativity on the other hand, do not. At a time when AI and other forms of advanced machine learning are gaining prominence, it would be unwise for humans to only focus on mastering abilities that can be easily outsourced to computers, warns Prof. Tsai.

The global race for fifth generation supremacy is under way, with countries competing to be the first to provide 5G mobile broadband services. The ultra-fast network will prompt inventions, of which today we cannot even dream. Countries around the world have devoted much resources to developing, manufacturing and deploying the new equipment necessary for 5G transmissions. China, for instance, has recently become highly influential in the field with its ability to develop infrastructure for 5G systems worldwide. In Asia, Hong Kong has been blamed for being slow to launch the new service in comparison with the mainland, South Korea and Japan. Actually, a delay is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows Hong Kong to have a longer testing period to ensure a more reliable and decent 5G mobile service. Hong Kong's privately-owned telecom market is very competitive and cautious.