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Mechanical engineering revealed airborne transmission of COVID-19 opportunistic in nature

In collaboration with the Guangdong CDC, Hunan CDC, Sun Yat-Sen University and Southeast University, Professor Yuguo Li, Chair Professor of Building Environment, and his team at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, conducted a series of epidemiological and environmental studies on three important COVID-19 outbreak cases in Mainland China and Tokyo, and revealed that poor air ventilation plays a key role in its spread in indoor environments.

Professor Li is an expert in ventilation of indoor environments with a focus on environmental transmission of diseases. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, Professor Li and a group of mechanical engineering experts at HKU developed an advanced mechanistic airflow model with computational fluid dynamics simulations and detailed thermo-fluid analyses to track and explain the main infection pattern and characteristics of the outbreak at Amoy Gardens and at Ward BA of Princess of Wales Hospital.

The team studied three major outbreak cases that occurred between January and March 2020:

The Guangzhou Restaurant case (occurred on January 24, 2020) where nine members from three non-associated families sitting in three separate tables (A, B and C) were infected by an index patient at table A located in the middle. Four people in the same table, three people in table Bon the left side of A, and two people in table Con the right side, were eventually infected.The three families did not know each other and had essentially no contact before, during or after the meal. The distance between the index patient (A 1) and the furthest away infected patron was 4.6 metres.

The Hunan buses case (occurred on January 22, 2020) where an index patient took two buses subsequently from Changsha to his home village in an afternoon and eventually infected 10 passengers in total. first leg of the journey involved a bus with 46 other people (passengers/driver). The 3 hours 20 minutes' ride resulted in seven passengers being infected. In the second journey on a minibus lasting about an hour, two out of 17 other people (passengers, driver and conductor) were infected. distance between the index patient (A 1) and furthest away infected patron was 9.5 metres.

• Professor Yuguo Li, Chair Professor of Building Environment, Department of Mechanical Engineering, HKU.

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The Diamond Princess Cruise case in Tokyo (January to March 2020), where a total of 696 confirmed cases (552 passengers and 144 crew members, of those 410 were asymptomatic) were reported by March 5, 2020 among the 2,666 passengers undergoing quarantine in their staterooms and 1,045 crew members on board the ship.

"In both the Guangzhou Restaurant case and the Hunan buses case, there is evidence that airborne is the probable way of transmission of the virus, given that those infected were sitting at a distance, and quite a number of them more than 2m apart from the index patients, and no other transmission route can explain the spatial pattern of the infection. We found that a poor ventilation rate is a major contributing factor to the virus' spreading in the environment." Professor Li said.

In short-range airborne transmission of diseases, droplet concentrations in the exhaled jet of air from an infected person continually decrease away from the mouth and the exhaled jet becomes sufficiently weakened to be indistinguishable from the background room air at a distance of approximately 1.5 m. However, if air ventilation is insufficient, the short-range airborne transmission route can be extended to result in a long-range airborne route to infect more people beyond the proximity (opportunistic airborne).

The major culprit is opportunistic airborne that occur in poorly ventilated areas, which can be understood as that a normally non-long-range-airborne infection turns to long-range airborne in poorly ventilated spaces. Opportunistic airborne transmission can lead to super-spreading events.

Professor Li said the most effective intervention to prevent the opportunistic transmission of COVID-19 is by effective ventilation and filtration and made the following recommendations:

To enhance air ventilation in indoor environments particularly in restaurants, public transport, bars, gyms, etc.

An indoor venue for heavy activities needs a higher ventilation rate than those for normal activities. Avoid social gatherings in an indoor environment where sufficient ventilation is not provided.

Installation of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) sensors in a room can be useful. A concentration of over 1,000 ppm may indicate that the room is not sufficiently ventilated.

Professor Li said, "One simple criterion for insufficient ventilation is that you can smell others' breaths even from a distance."

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Number of susceptible 46 17 88 Number of infected 7 2 9 except index p atient Attack rate (%) 15.2% 11.8% 10.2% Ventilation rates 1.7 3.2 0.6

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.a. Table 1. Main parameters in the Guangzhou Restaurant outbreak and Hunan buses outbreak.

Concluding from the findings (table 1 }, the team suggests that airborne transmission of COVID-19 outbreak in the indoor environment is likely when the ventilation rate is less than 3 L/s per person, with a sufficient exposure period. Professor Li also expects a ventilation rate of 8-10 L/s per person, similarly to that on the cruise, to be sufficient for minimizing airborne infection risk.

"Our findings do not rule out large droplets or other possible sources of Covid-19 transmission such as aerosols generated during medical procedures or fomites via contaminated surfaces. The findings instead provide evidence that short-range airborne is also a major transmission channel, which in turn suggests that other precautionary measures have to be taken in order to better contain the pandemic." Professor Li said.

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Reusable nanofibrous face mask invented by Civil Engineering Students

A team of undergraduate students, led by Mr Junwei Zhang and Ms Yan Tung Lo and under the supervision of Professor Chuyang Tang and Dr Hao Guo at the Department of Civil Engineering, has successfully developed reusable face masks with novel air filters.

The filters, having a nanofibrous structure prepared by electrospinning, show significantly higher particle removal efficiency compared to existing filter materials used for face masks. Moreover, the filters are reusable after simple rinsing and drying. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the team hopes to enhance the reusability of masks and reduce secondary environmental pollution caused by mask disposals.

Existing face masks mainly use melt-blown fibers as the core filter material, yet the lack of uniformity and functional durability of the material poses a critical challenge to the removal of fine particulates including viruses and bioaerosols. To address the issue, the research team uses the electrospinning technique to fabricate nanofibrous filters with improved uniformity and enhanced filtration capability. The novel filters consist of numerous nanofibers with diameters at the nanometer scale, which is much smaller than the melt-blown fibers at the micrometer scale. The filters possess high porosity (e.g., > 80%), which effectively reduces their air filtration resistance.

The interconnected nanofibrous network also ensures a high removal efficiency of air pollutants due to its fine structure and tailored surface chemistry. In the preliminary experiments, the team designed a novel sandwich-like structure, composed of two hydrophobic skin layers and an inner functional layer, to further enhance the mechanical strength and filtration performance of the filters. The skin layers consist of nanofibers with a large dimension (e.g., 800-1,000 nm in diameter), which can provide sufficient mechanical strength. Meanwhile, their hydrophobic nature can effectively prevent the wetting and penetration of water and thus protect the inner functional layer. The inner layer consists of small nanofibers of 100-400 nm in diameter, whose fine filter pore size allows more effective capture and retention of air pollutants.

.a. Nanofibrous face mask prototype developed by the st udent team from Department of Civil Engineering.

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.a. Different assembling strategies for nanofibrous air filter.

Air filtration results show that the novel nanofibrous filters have significantly higher removal efficiency for 0.3-, 2.5-, and 10-µm particles compared to that of single-use face masks. For example, the nanofibrous filter can have a removal efficiency ~90% for 0.3-µm particles while the single-use face masks only have an efficiency of < 50%. To address the concern of secondary pollutions associated with single-use masks, the team has designed the filters to be ethanol-washable to enable filter disinfection, regeneration, and reuse. After a simple ethanol rinsing and heat drying, the regenerated filters are shown to effectively maintain their filtration efficiency. This reusable feature means improved sustainability and reduced burden on the environment. Currently, the team is optimizing the functions of the nanofibrous filters and developing original product prototypes.

The project is supported by the COVID-19 Action Seed Funding and the Dean's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund provided by the Faculty of Engineering at HKU. Other project team members include two Computer Science students: Mr Junyuan Wang and Mr Tianlin Sun; Biomedical Engineering student Mr Jieran Sun, and Accounting & Finance student Ms Feiyang Jin. The project also involves three student helpers, Ms Lanjun Yao, Mr Yulun Wu and Mr Jinze Cui.

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The team has filed for a US Provisional Patent with assistance from the Technology Transfer Office of HKU. It has received a Gold Medal, a 'Top 20 Best Invention Award; and a 'Special Award by Toronto International Society of Innovation & Advanced Skills (TISIAS)' in the 5th International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada. The group is exploring potential collaboration with industrial partners to commercialize the technology.

The work is shown by the Membrane-based Environmental & Sustainable Technology Group (MembEST), a specialty group led by Professor Chuyang Tang that focuses on membranes and filters.The novel air filter technology adds to the group's existing invention portfolio, which aims to provide integrated solutions for the control of water and air pollution to safeguard public health.

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.a. The invention won a Gold Medal, a 'Top 20 Best Invention Award; and a 'Special Award by Toronto International Society of Innovation & Advanced Skills (TISIAS)' in the 5th International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN).

The group has previously patented an electricity-free water filter technology for rapid contaminant removal, which received several prestigious awards including the HKIE Outstanding Paper Award for Young Engineers/Researchers (2020), Gold Medal at Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions (2019), and Innovators Under 35 for Asia Pacific by MIT Technology Review (2019). Before joining HKU in 2013, Professor Tang had invented the aquaporin-based biomimetic membrane technology, a promising desalination technology that has been commercialized by the Singapore-based company Aquaporin Asia.

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From technology to daily life: A handy thermography fever detection system for public transportations

.A. The team hopes that the portable thermography fever detection system can be applied in public transportation commonly in the future.

Thermography, also known as thermal imaging, has been developing as fever screening technology since the SARS outbreak, and is now a common tool in fighting COVID-19. It is widely used in venues such as restaurants, fitness centres, and beauty salons, etc. However, existing systems have to be connected to computer systems and require professional set up. Besides, this kind of system is yet to be seen in public transportation.

A multidisciplinary group of researchers from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Sciences Jed by Dr S.C. Fu, Research Assistant Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has recently explored a low-cost thermography fever detection system which is portable and can be easily accessed and mastered by users. Multiple trials have been conducted at the HKU campus since early May.The research team hopes that this portable thermography fever detection system can be applied in public transportation, such as taxis, shuttle buses and minibuses commonly in the future.

Thermography uses an infrared camera to display a colorful image with thermal information. While most of the existing commercial thermography fever detection systems require a server and fixed installation, this newly-developed system is non-intrusive and portable which can be run on mobile devices such as mobile phone and tablet with a small thermal camera plug in. The thermal camera plugin in the current prototype is a commercial product which costs around HK$3,000 per set and this accounts for most of the hardware cost. Thus, as compared to other similar systems in the market, the total cost of the current prototype is far lower and the system is more handy.

.A. The thermal image of a person with normal temperature using this newly-developed thermography fever detection system.

Furthermore, this non-intrusive system can be used for rapid screening and singling out suspected fever cases as it uses face detection technique to identify people and automatically check the forehead temperature of multiple persons at the same time. It has successfully overcome the challenge of systems available in the market which require the thermometer to be pointed at the person's forehead and cannot operate on multiple persons simultaneously.

"Smartphone/ tablet is a daily necessity nowadays. Just imagine how convenient it is if our smartphone can be used as a thermography fever detection system with only a small plug-in," said Dr S.C. Fu,"the system is automated so that the driver can focus on the road, without the need to perform temperature checks on passengers manually, he explained. "To ensure personal privacy, only thermal image, instead of the face of the person, is shown on the screen," Dr Fu further elaborated .

The accuracy of thermography technology for temperature measure highly depends on the distance between the camera and the target person; the skin condition of the person, and the environmental conditions. In the trial runs at HKU Campus which has been undergoing since early May, the group have successfully achieved a minimal error of 0.31-0.57°C by simply adjusting the environmental parameters, while existing systems require expertise support and expensive instrument for calibration in every different situation to achieve a similar accuracy.

Dr Fu added, "The best use of thermography system is to screen people quickly for singling out those with abnormal temperature. To work towards this purpose without increasing the cost of the device, we plan to further develop the system for application in specific scenarios so that distance effect, target person's condition and environmental factors could be controlled and easily calibrated. We hope that this system can be applied in public transportation such as shuttle buses and minibuses in the near future."

The system can also inspire STEM teaching and learning in the public, especially in secondary schools. The team plans to organise summer courses and produce videos to introduce the basic principle of the system. Students can develop their own systems after learning the technology.

The co-leader of the project, Professor Dennis Leung, Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering, remarked,"Hong Kong is a city with cutting-edge technology. In the era of information, we have a vision that people not only enjoy using new technology, but are also interested in developing their own products. We wish our mobile thermography fever detection system can be developed as a platform to promote STEM learning to the public and nurture young people to become the 'master' of technology."

.A. The thermal imaging of a person with high temperature (simulated by wearing a hot pad).A warning tone will be t riggered to alert the driver.

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Virtual forum on HKU's Big Ideas on Combating COVID-19 Pandemic

Multidisciplinary discussions could bring different perspectives on huge issues faced globally. The University of Hong Kong organised the "Virtual Forum on HKU's Big Ideas on Combatting the COVID-19 Pandemic" forum aimed at generating "big ideas" to address global challenges via innovative research in an interdisciplinary setting. The forum featured talks from nine HKU professors, including the Dean of Engineering Professor Christopher Chao, Professor Yuguo Li of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Professor Reynold Cheng of the Department of Computer Science, with interactive Q&As. It

A (From left) Professor Yuguo Li, Professor Christopher Chao and Professor Reynold Cheng.

was followed by a brainstorming session for the speakers and other HKU academic staff to build on issues raised and consider big ideas related to COVID-19 in which multidisciplinary HKU teams could lead the research.

In the forum, Professor Christopher Chao talked about how Engineering respond to COVID-19, while Professor Yuguo Li and Professor Reynold Cheng shared their views on "Transmission Routes of COVID-19 and Indoor Environment" and "Can Big Data and Al useful for COVID-19 Analysis" respectively.

HKU Engineering COVID-19 Action Seed Funding Scheme The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented global challenge, impacting profoundly on health and wellbeing, daily life as well as the economy around the world. Concerted efforts from different disciplines are needed in order to tackle the issues. Researchers from all over the world are proactively thinking of what we can assist our society, from making more effective personal protective equipment to developing new models and systems to better understand how the viruses are transmitted. There are thousands of collaborative efforts against COVID-19 taking place each and every day.

The Faculty has introduced a "HKU Engineering COVID-19 Action Seed Funding Scheme" in encouraging novel ideas and products that could be delivered in short to medium term. We believe that some of these projects will be very useful in helping our society in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and can also bring in large collaboration opportunities w ith colleagues from other disciplines and from the community at large.

Projects of the "HKU Engineering COVID-19 Action Seed Funding Scheme":

1. Sewage Surveillance as Early-warning Signal of COVID-19 Outbreak in Communities

2. Novel porous materials for virus removal and antiviral protection 3. Thermography fever detection system for mobile devices 4. A Low-Cost loT Device That Helps Prevent Spreading of COVID-19 5. An automatic system for surveilling genetic variants in new

SARS-CoV-2 strains and predicting their resistance to new vaccines and drugs

6. Predicting the Impact of Government Responses on the COVID-19 Pandemic:A Machine Learning Approach

7. Investigating the influence of nanodiamonds on biofilms:towards surgical mask with nanodiamonds as filters fighting against coronavirus

8. Ultrasonic disinfection of personal protective equipment for environmental sustainability

9. Development of Intelligent UV Source for Disinfection Robots 10. SmartTraceabilityforCOVID-19 in Hong Kong 11. Logistics Automation at a Quarantine Camp 12. Digitally Twinned Cyber-Physical Smart Quarantine Facilities for

Physical and Mental Health 13. A Cloud-enabled Smart Protective Mask 14. Novel VUV disinfection chamber for efficient sterilizing fabric

materials, medical and surgical products against COVID-19 virus 15. Anti-Covid-19 by Engineering Surface Structure and Wettability

16. Fume Dynamics in Building Drainage System and Roof-Level Dispersion:A Study on the Impact of Effluent from a Ventilated Stack on the Nearby Built Environment

17. Development of novel anti-COVID-19 stainless steel 18. Organic transistors for the virus sensing applications 19. Heat-Resistant Air Filtration Membranes with Solution-Processable

Aramid Nanofibers 20. Highly-sensitive Antibody Detection through Image Acquisition and

Processing on Gradient Patterned Metasurface 21. Filtration of viruses through physical barriers:towards the rational

design of high performance filters and masks 22. Characterizing the Surface Chemical Affinities of New

Anti-Virus/Bacteria Copper- Based Spinel Materials 23. Analysis and Visualization of MTR Passenger Behavior During COVIDl 9 24. COVID-19 Social Behavior Control Robot in Dense Regions 25. A Virtual Classroom System for Young Kids 26. Privacy-preserving smart wristband for health monitoring and early

detection of COVID-19 27. Roles of bulding drainage system in the Luk Chuen House Covid-19

Outbreak 28. Ultra-sensitive detection of SARS-COV-2 protein for early diagnosis

based on high-throughput digital ELISA 29. Synergistic effects of facial masks and respirators on human thermal,

dermal,and respiratory regulations 30. Acoustic design for turbo-charged air filtration to combat virus

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Raising the level of water technology

In a high density, highly urbanised city like Hong Kong, wastewater treatment is of the prime importance to ensure public health. In recent years local research in the area has been stepped up, resulting in advanced technology that yields diverse benefits.

Researchers from Department of Civil Engineering have focused on resource recovery and sustainability of wastewater treatment, says Professor Li Xiao-yan, who has been carrying out research in the field for 20 years. In contrary to traditional treatment technology developed decades ago, Professor Li and his fellow researchers have addressed the water pollution issue from the key perspectives of environmental protection, conservation of resources, and due to the unique context of Hong Kong, safe water supply.

Tackling challenges of a unique city

.a. (From left) Professor Kaimin Shih, Professor Li Xiao-yan, Dr May Chui and Professor Zhang Tong are among the forerunners in global research in water science and technology.

Generation of useful resources

"We promote recovery of resources from wastewater and sludge," said Professor Li."lt is estimated that 15% to 20 % of food consumption end up in sewage, not utilised but discharged as pollutants; if we are able to recover them, we save the environment while saving the resources. We no longer focus on removal but on separation and recovery of materials." His team also promotes water reclamation or wastewater reuse.

Comparing their endeavour to the conventional process of oxidation and degradation, Professor Li said his HKU team is at the forefront in global research on the recovery of materials. One recent advancement is the recovering of energy and materials from thermally hydrolysed sewage sludge. Professor Li's team succeeded in generating fibrous materials that can be used for making papers from fungal hyphae grown through fungal fermentation.

Another HKU Civil Engineering Professor, Kaimin Shih, has developed a catalytic membrane technology which will change the whole process of water purification and wastewater treatment. He found it particularly challenging to do the research in a compact city like Hong Kong."Compared to other renowned universities in the world, an important task we face here at HKU is to tackle the challenges of an urban environment." It is an environment in which the wastewater generated is not the same as that generated half a century ago, containing a greater variety of chemicals than before. Many are hard to be biodegraded, or of different kinds of characteristic, which demand different kinds of physical and chemical treatment."These chemicals may not exist in other developed cities, we are in a unique situation how they end up in the system," Professor Shih said.

At the invitation of the Water Supplies Department, Professor Shih started a project a few years ago to identify a robust, convenient and reliable water sampling protocols - in the wake of the Lead in Drinking Water Incidents in 2015 in which some household tap water samples were found to contain amounts of lead exceeding World Health Organisation standards. After periods of testing, analysing and designing, he developed a water sampling protocol which has then been well-implemented and proven to be highly effective for the purposes.

Professor Shih has also won commendation from the Drainage Services Department for his hydrothermal carbonization technology for improving sludge dewaterability at Shek Wu Hui Sewage Treatment Works. An advanced technology to turn biomass into high quality "brown coal'; it opens the door for the next generation of sludge treatment options.

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Curbing the rise of antibiotic resistance genes

Professor Zhang Tong, also from the Department of Civil Engineering, emphasises the importance of water and wastewater treatment especially in today's world when more antibiotics than ever have been found in water environment. For the past decade he has carried out research on an emerging pollutant, antibiotic resistance genes, whose dissemination through antibiotic-resistant bacteria poses a threat to public health. He and his co-investigators have produced a number of highly-cited publications in the frontier area of research.

It is an area that has attracted much international attention. The past years have seen increased antibiotics discharged from animal farms, hospitals, pharmaceutical wastewater plants in addition to human bodies, Professor Zhang noted. "If we treat sewage in a good way, we can minimise the residue antibiotic in the effluent and remove the bacteria." In this regard, Hong Kong lags behind Europe and to some extent places like Beijing in that it lacks mandatory rules for hospitals in relation to wastewater treatment," he said.

His team has developed a system of measurement for antibiotic resistance genes -widely used by researchers elsewhere - through DNA sequencing, which requires mathematical analysis to dig out resistant genes from a vast amount of data. Their long-term goal is to develop a novel integrative risk assessment and management framework for antibiotic-resistant bacteria and harmful micro-pollutants in wastewater effluent and reclaimed water.

Saving Rainwater

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Dr May Chui is another researcher from HKU's Department of Civil Engineering with a passion for water resources. For a decade she has focused on environmentally friendly, sustainable stormwater management. Hong Kong usually experiences typhoons and much rainfall during the summer, and Dr Chui is committed to retaining the water rather than simply getting them out into the sea."We will lose water as a resource if we simply stop the potential floods

through the drains. There can be more natural ways to hold the water so as to support the plants in the city while solving the flooding issue," she noted.

Her work has won recognition from the Drainage Services Department for her application of porous pavement that can save rainwater for planting and other purposes. Rainwater can be stored underground through the porous pavement, which in turn is utilised by roadside t rees and planters. Such endeavour requires special designs that fit the road situation and the level of groundwater in the city.

Certainly, engineers and researchers like her and the others above are paying attention to burning environmental issues. In 2018, the Faculty of Engineering took a further step of establishing the Centre for Water Technology and Policy with the Faculty of Social Sciences of HKU to take on a more proactive role in ensuring their research can bring forth social benefits. The interdisciplinary centre seeks to offer cutting-edge research findings to help the government formulate effective policies.

"Traditionally engineering is about technology alone but we have realised the importance of policy," said Professor Li."Technological development is one thing, while application and implementation of our findings is another. We want to be more impactful w ith our research output, and being able to influence policy is important."

The engineers are open to collaborations with academics from other disciplines within the university, as well as working on more government projects.

"Our work is not limited to water reuse or treatment technology. It has started to have policy elements. Our work has become softer," said Professor Li.

.As The Centre for Water Technology and Policy, a collaboration between Faculties of Engineering and Social Sciences at HKU, aspires to becoming the focal point on water technology and water policy research that has direct policy relevance for Hong Kong.

.As The team nurtures a large group of young researchers who have passion for water science and technology.

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Driven by scientific pursuits Their time spent abroad shaped their scientific research career but for two professors from The University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Engineering, it is their commitment to fundamental research that led to their notable breakthroughs.

Professor Huang Mingxin from the Department of Mechanical Engineering had spent four years doing both his doctoral studies and research backed by ArcelorMittal in Maizieres-les-Metz, France, the world's leading steel and mining company,in the 2000's.Originallyfrom the mainland,he joined HKU in 2010 and has since won a string of awards and patents for his inventions in the area of metallic science.

Ground-breaking steel His latest discovery - Super Steel (also called D&P Steel) - was published in the prestigious journal Science in 2017 and 2020,and brought him the Global Innovation Award at TechConnect World Innovation Conference & Expo in 2018.

"We attained an unprecedented strength-toughness combination which can address a major challenge in safety-critical industrial applications - to attain an ultra-high fracture toughness so as to prevent catastrophic premature fracture of structural materials," said Professor Huang."The breakthrough also changes the conventional view that attaining high strength will be at the expense of deteriorating toughness, which invariably leads to the embrittlement of structural materials and greatly limits their application."

The Super Steel has great potential for mass production since it is exceptionally inexpensive and can be developed using conventional industrial processing routes, including warm rolling, cold rolling and annealing, in contrary to the complex process of developing other metallic materials.

New venture ahead In January 2020, he was awarded an RMBl 1.07 million funding in the second round of the National Key Research & Development Programmes (NKPs) of the PRC's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) that is open for researchers in Hong Kong and Macau.

Professor Huang will lead a team of researchers from HKU, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian University of Technology and Xi'an Jiaotong University with expertise in areas such as metallurgy, mechanics, nuclear technology and ab-initio calculation to develop new nanostructural high entropy alloys that have the potential for application in extremely low temperatures or in nuclear power plants.

The need for a new type of alloy became prominent after the collapse of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011."The alloy in the shell of the plant had been used for a long time, its risk tolerance was very low and collapsed after a long period of exposure to radiation. It was not ductile enough to resist fracture when the accident happened."

..i. (From left) Professor Huang Mingxin and Dr Luo Ping are two of the many young innovators at the HKU Faculty of Engineering.

Steel production is indispensable to modern living anywhere in the world, and Professor Huang has had long term collaborations with companies in Europe and China, such as BaoSteel, Angang Steel, besides the French company he spent years working for. "Researchers are constantly trying to make better steel to make our lives better," he said. "Much investment has been poured into research on steel globally but not in Hong Kong as it is a small place."

But having built up his own lab and research team at the department, thanks to government funding and the support of other funding agencies, he has carved out a distinguished career discovering solutions to issues long associated with the production of steel and other key materials.

"Usually when you make steel very strong, they become brittle, like ceramic. It cannot be used to make cars or planes. My Super Steel is very strong but not brittle, it's even more ductile than other steel and can avoid the problem of sudden fracture."

..i. Professor Huang will lead a team to develop new nanostructural high entropy alloys that have the potential for application in extremely low temperatures or in nuclear power plants.

His team has looked into other useful materials including Nickle free stainless steel, which has applicational value for the watch industry for customers with Nickle allergy;anti-virus steel that can be used for the benefit of public health, for example in toilet flush or lift buttons.

Being awarded fills him with happiness and pride. He is equally thankful for the opportunity of working in his own lab. "I am thankful to our department. Like the entire university, they have changed from being teaching oriented 20, 30 years ago to being research intensive."

Young Innovator in the midst of perseverance Another innovator from the Faculty of Engineering, Luo Ping, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, ranks among the 20 Innovators Under 35 selected for the Asia Pacific Region by MIT Technology Review, a prestigious global news media on important new technologies under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among the past recipients of the honour are Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

His breakthroughs cover autonomous machine learning, normalisation, and optimisation of deep neural networks. He also contributes many popular benchmarks to facilitate Al and computer vision researches for both academia and industry such as CelebA, the most widely used image database for face image generation,and DeepFashion, the largest image database for understanding fashion trend by analysing clothing images. His input helped companies in delivering online sales, mobile shopping/entertainment, and virtual try-on, as offered on the e-commerce site Taobao.

The core technology of Al The foundation of the above researches and applications lies in understanding how deep learning really works in computer vision. He recalled with pride that he was the first student in his research group and even in Asia to do research in the area while at CUHK. "After our experiment, students were split into groups by the professor to do deep learning."

In 2014, his research team broke world record of face identity analysis by surpassing recognition rate of human vision for the first time worldwide in the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) Challenge, outperforming Facebook, Google and many other institutions. His specialized area of convolutional neural network (CNN) has important applications in robots and smartphones.

While facial recognition system is increasingly used in different countries, at shops, subway stations, airports and other venues to bolster efficiency and convenience, Dr Luo expects the technology to be widely adopted in about three years,and human like robots to become reality in about a decade.

"In some mainland cities such as Harbin, under an automatic payment system at the metro station passengers do not need to show any card or credit card to enter the train. Because of the facial recognition system, they don't have to worry about how to pay. Machines nowadays can understand human identity."

.a. Dr Luo Ping is one of the 20 Innovators Under 35 for the Asia Pacific Region, selected by MIT Technology Review.

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.a. Dr Luo contributes many popular benchmarks to facilitate Al and computer vision researches for both academia and industry. DeepFashion, the largest image database for under.;tnaidng trend by analysing clothing images, is one good example. The human brain, he said, which is capable of performing multiple

tasks, can be considered as a single general machine learning model. But there is no need to mimic the biological mechanisms of human brains."With the development in deep learning, we are able to design a mixture of different models with each solving specific tasks. For some specific tasks, machines can do better than the human brain," he added. "For examples, AlphaGo, a computer program that plays the board game Go, beat top human professional players in 2016 1 ; In 2019, another program AlphaStar beat top human players at strategy game StarCraft 11 2 and a poker-playing bot Pluribus beat human in six-player no-limit Texas hold'em poker game 3• And in reality, more than 60% of stock trading in the stock exchange are made by Al software."

With an interest in teaching and hoping to educate the new generation of Al experts, Dr Luo returned to the academia, joining HKU in 2019. Although there are far more Al companies offering bright career prospects and lucrative pay in China, Dr Luo prefers to remain here.

"The opportunities in Hong Kong for Al are a bit limited but I still want to motivate young people to join the field. There are many good Al companies in Hong Kong and there can be more in the future."

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A novel 3D imaging technology to make fluorescence microscopy more efficient and push the boundaries of living cells research Scientists have been using fluorescence microscopy to study the inner workings of biological cells and organisms for decades. However, many of these platforms are often too slow to follow the biological action in 30; and too damaging to the living biological specimens with strong light illumination.

To address these challenges, a research team led by Professor Kevin Tsia, Professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Programme Director of Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering, developed a new optical imaging technology- Coded Light-sheet Array Microscopy (CLAM) - which can perform 30 imaging at high speed, and is power efficient and gentle to preserve the living specimens during scanning at a level that is not achieved by existing technologies.

This advanced imaging technology was recently published in Light: Science & Applications. An US patent application has been filed for the innovation.

"CLAM allows 30 fluorescence imaging at high frame rate comparable to state-of-the-art technology (-10's volumes per second). More importantly, it is much more power efficient, being over 1,000 times gentler than the standard 30 microscopes widely used in scientific laboratories, which greatly reduces the damage done to living specimens during scanning," explained ProfessorTsia.

Existing 30 biological microscopy platforms are slow because the entire volume of the specimen has to be sequentially scanned and imaged point-by-point, line-by-line or plane-by-plane. In these platforms, a single 30 snapshot requires repeated illumination on the specimen. The specimens are often illuminated for thousands to million times more intense than the sunlight. It is likely to damage the specimen itself, thus is not favorable for long-term biological imaging for diverse applications like anatomical science, developmental biology and neuroscience.

Moreover, these platforms often quickly exhaust the limited fluorescence "budget" - a fundamental constraint that fluorescent light can only be generated upon illumination for a limited period before it permanently fades out in a process called "photo-bleaching", which sets a limit to how many image acquisitions can be performed on a sample.

"Repeated illumination on the specimen not only accelerates photo-bleaching, but also generates excessive fluorescence light that does not eventually form the final image. Hence, the fluorescence "budget" is largely wasted in these imaging platforms," ProfessorTsia added.

The heart of CLAM is transforming a single laser beam into a high-density array of "light-sheets" with the use of a pair of parallel mirrors, to spread over a large area of the specimen as fluorescence excitation.

"The image within the entire 30 volume is captured simultaneously (i.e. parallelized), without the need to scan the

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specimen point-by-point or line-by-line or plane-by-plane as required by other techniques. Such 30 parallelization in CLAM leads to a very gentle and efficient 30 fluorescence imaging without sacrificing sensitivity and speed," as pointed out by Dr Yuxuan Ren, a postdoctoral researcher of the work. CLAM also outperforms the common 30 fluorescence imaging methods in reducing the effect of photo-bleaching.

"CLAM has no fundamental limitation in imaging speed. The only constraint is from the speed of the detector employed in the system, i.e. the camera for taking snapshots.As high-speed camera technology continually advances, CLAM can always challenge its limit to attain an even higher speed in scanning," highlighted by Dr Jianglai Wu, the postdoctoral research who initiated the work.

The team has taken a step further to combine CLAM with HKU LKS Faculty of Medicine's newly developed tissue clearing technology to perform 30 visualization of mouse glomeruli and intestine blood vasculature in high frame-rate.

"We anticipate that this combined technique can be extended to large-scale 30 histopathological investigation of archival biological samples, like mapping the cellular organization in brain for neuroscience research." Professor Tsia said.

"Since CLAM imaging is significantly gentler than all other methods, it uniquely favours long term and continuous 'surveillance' of biological specimen in their living form. This could potentially impact our fundamental understanding in many aspects of cell biology, e.g. to continuously track how an animal embryo develops into its adult form; to monitor in real-time how the cells/organisms get infected by bacteria or viruses; to see how the cancer cells are killed by drugs, and other challenging tasks unachievable by existing technologies today," Professor Tsia added.

CLAM can be adapted to many current microscope systems with minimal hardware or software modification. Taking advantage of this, the team is planning to further upgrade the current CLAM system for research in cell biology, animal and plant developmental biology.

.As Professor Kevin Tsia (1st from right) and his team developed a new optical imaging technology to make 3D fluorescence microscopy more efficient and less damaging. (From left: Dr Yuxuan Ren, Dr Queenie Lai and Professor Kevin Tsia)

This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between HKU Faculty of Engineering and LKS Faculty of Medicine. It was funded by HKSAR Research Grants Council, Innovation and Technology Support Program, the University Development Funds of the University of Hong Kong and the Natural Science Foundation of China.

• •• . . . " • I .• ,

A non-destructive method of analysing molecules in cells: Fibre laser microscopy for use in clinical applications

.A. Physicist Professor Thomas Huser at Bielefeld University (left) and Electrical and Electronic Engineer Professor Kenneth K.Y. Wong at HKU led the research in developing the fibre laser microscope.

A research group led by Professor Kenneth KY. Wong of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, in collaboration with Bielefeld University in Germany, has developed a compact fibre laser microscope that brought breakthroughs to analysing molecules in cells and clinical applications.

The newly innovated microscope generates far less noise than customary designs, and the compactness and stability make it suitable for use in operating rooms in hospitals. The innovation was presented in the journal 'Light: Science and Applications: published by Springer Nature.

When investigating how tumors grow, or how pharmaceuticals affect different types of cells, researchers have to understand how molecules within a cell react - and interact. This is possible with modern fluorescence microscopy. However, molecules in cell specimens had to be labelled with fluorescent substances to make them visible, and this can distort the very behavior of the molecules. Also the staining with fluorescent markers is generally unsuitable for in vivo tissues.

Label-free microscopic imaging has always been a hot topic in biomedical research.The newly invented laser microscope does not require fluorescent markers to obtain a clear image of cell molecules. Instead, cell molecules with different level of characteristics are uniquely presented via a Raman Imaging System.

Professor Kenneth Wong, who led the research said: 'We use fiber laser as the light source of the optical microscope to replace the traditional solid-state laser, which is a brand new concept. Traditionally, the laser needs to be amplified in a free space of several meters, so the instrument is very big. With fiber lasers, light is amplified and transmitted through glass fibers, and the instrument design becomes light and compact. The volume is only one-eighth to one-tenth of the traditional solid-state laser instrument. Due to the size of the instrument, there is a limitation on where it can be used currently, but this will no longer pose a problem in future."

Professor Wong explained: "Fiber lasers were previously not favorable for microscopes because they were less powerful and very noisy compared to solid state lasers. To obtain molecule-specific imaging with their microscope, the team used two synchronized optical resonators (laser cavities), both with short picosecond pulses - one picosecond being one thousand billionth of a second."

"One challenge here was to control the lasers so that both beams with different wavelengths are synchronized, and hit the specimen at exactly the same time and position," said Professor Thomas Huser in Germany,a biophysicist at Bielefeld University.

Professor Huser believes that the new microscope is likely to be used in clinical applications in the coming years. Preliminary studies in cooperation with the Evangelisches Klinikum Bielefeld Hospital in Germany are already underway to use the microscope to analyze liver tissue samples."

"Our project partners are amazed by what this microscope can do." said Professor Huser. "Label-free microscopy can be used, for instance, to investigate how various new types of cells develop from stem cells. It also allows for a tumor to be demarcated from normal tissue without staining. Furthermore, we can ascertain how pharmaceutical compounds react with molecules in the muscle tissue cells of the heart and liver, as well as other cells."

Professor Wong believes the new technology can be applied in many biomedical applications, such as the endoscopy of the intestines and digestive system, etc., to detect early tumors and lesions.

"Using fiber laser, the image clarity can be 100 times higher than that of traditional endoscopes. It can penetrate the surface of organs and reflect the condition of deeper tissues. The light source uses harmless infrared visible light and will not affect the human body. In the long run, since it is portable, unmarked and harmless, it can be clinically used in surgical operations,such as immediate pathological detection, to mark tumor borders during an operation, or to accurately mark different parts for precise cuts during brain surgeries."

Both the University of Hong Kong and Bielefeld University have pioneering research in the biomedical and health technology fields, while HKU's Engineering Faculty is especially focused in the research of imaging technologies. This research was supported by the Germany/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme sponsored by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and the Germany Academic Exchange Service of Germany, the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant, project "DeLIVER'; the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Innovation and Technology Fund.

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.A. CARS (left) and SRS (right) images of living human cells. (a)(b) CARS and SRS images of living osteosarcoma (U20SJ cells acquired simultaneously. (c)(d) CARS and SRS images of a living differentiating primary myoblast (PMD).

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Super Steel project attains major breakthrough with collaborators at Berkeley Lab

.6 The super steel is tested on its level of fracture resistance.

The Super Steel project led by Professor Huang Mingxin at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, with collaborators at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), has made important breakthrough in its new super D&P steel (produced using a new deformed and partitioned method) to greatly enhance its fracture resistance while maintaining super strong in strength for advanced industrial applications.

The findings were published in Science in the paper t itled "Making Ultrastrong Steel Tough by Grain-Boundary Delamination''.

Steel is a common alloy. Material scientists and engineers are continually seeking to develop new generation steel materials which are easier to extend and elongate (ductility) into different forms and structures, higher in resistance to deformation (strength) and fracture (toughness), light in weight and low in production cost.

The task has been difficult. The conventional view is that raising the performance of one metallic property, whether in strength, ductility or toughness, will undermine one or more of the others. For example,an increase in strength will inevitably make the metal more brittle (known as the strength-toughness trade-off); or less flexible to be extended or elongated into different shapes. (strength-ductility trade-off).

"In this latest breakthrough in super D&P steel, we attained an unprecedented strength-toughness combination which can address a major challenge in safety-critical industrial applications - to attain an ultra-high fracture toughness so as to prevent catastrophic premature fracture of structural materials. The breakthrough also changes the conventional view that attaining high strength will be at the expense of deteriorating toughness, which invariably leads to the embrittlement of structural materials and greatly limits their application," said Professor Huang.

The team had earlier raised significantly the D&P steel's strength-ductility performance, the super D&P steel hence attains excellent performance in all three metallic properties at an unprecedented high-level not reached by any steel materials before.

Several patents in US, EU and China have been filed. The team has been liaising with industrial partners to generate prototypes of high-strength bridge cable, bullet proof vest and car spring with the super steel for further tests and trials to be conducted. The latest breakthrough in the D&P steel, made in collaboration with Professor Robert 0. Ritchie's research team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and UC Berkeley, results in the steel a yield strength resistance against deformation of-2GPa,a superior fracture toughness of 102MPa mY2, and a good uniform elongation of 19%.

.6 Professor Huang Mingxin and PhD student Miss Liu Li. The new D&P super steel attains major breakthrough in reaching an unprecedented high-level of fracture resistance, and excellent performance in ductility and strength not met by any steel materials before.

The team has also made an important scientific discovery in the structure of the super D&P steel.The super steel has a unique fracture feature in which multiple micro-cracks are formed below the main fracture surface, through a novel "high-strength induced multi-delamination" toughening mechanism. These micro-cracks can effectively absorb energy

.6 The super steel demonstrates a superior fracture toughness of 102MPamY>.

from externally applied forces, resulting in the steel's much higher toughness resistance compared to existing steel materials.

Currently, high strength steel for bridge cables has a yield strength lower than 1.7 GPa -, and a fracture toughness lower than 65 MPa mY2; high strength armoured steel used in armoured cars has a similar maximum strength - toughness combination. The toughness level that can be attained by the D&P steel is hence much higher than that of existing steel materials, while maintaining super strong in strength.

Steel piano wire, for instance, has an ultra-high strength ranging from 2.6 to 2.9 GPa to resist deformation and to keep the instrument in tune, which is achieved at the expense of toughness and is in turn very brittle.

Meanwhile, the cost of raw materials of the D&P steel is only 20% of the maraging steel currently used in aerospace (e.g. Grade 300, whose yield strength and fracture initiation toughness are 1.8 GPa and 70 MPa mYi, respectively).

"D&P steel has other advantages such as simple industrial processing and low raw-materials cost. It can be produced by conventional rolling and annealing processes, as such no complex fabrication routes and special equipment are required," said Miss Li Liu, the first author of the journal article and a PhD student supervised by Professor Huang.

"We have made a big step closer to industrializing the novel super steel. It demonstrates a great potential to be used in various applications including superior bulletproof vests, bridge cables, lightweight automobile and military vehicles, aerospace, and high strength bolts and nuts in the construction industry." Professor Huang added.

• • < • •

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Novel high-speed microscope to capture brain neuroactivities

Our brain contains tens of billions of nerve cells (neurons) which constantly communicate with each other by sending chemical and electrical flashes, each lasting a short one millisecond (0.001 sec). In every millisecond, these billions of swift-flying flashes altogether traveling in a giant star-map in the brain that lights up a tortuous glittering pattern. They are the origins of all body functions and behaviours such as emotions, perceptions, thoughts, actions, and memories; and also brain diseases e.g. alzheimer's and parkinson's diseases, in case of abnormalities.

One grand challenge for neuroscience in the 2,st century is to capture these complex flickering patterns of neural activities, which is the key to an integrated understanding of the large-scale brain-wide interactions. To capture these swift-flying signals live has been a challenge to neuroscientists and biomedical engineers. It would take a high-speed microscope into the brain, which has not been possible so far.

A research team led by Professor Kevin Tsia, Professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Programme Director of Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering; and Professor Ji Na, from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) offers a novel solution with their super high-speed microscope - two-photon fluorescence microscope, which has successfully recorded the millisecond electrical signals in the neurons of an alert mouse.

The new technique is minimally invasive to the animal being tested compared to the traditional method that require inserting an electrode into the brain tissue. Not only is this less damaging to the neurons but also can pinpoint individual neurons and trace their firing paths, millisecond by millisecond.

The result of this ground-breaking work has recently been published in the academic journal Nature Methods. The project was funded by the National Institute of Health, U.S.

At the heart of the high-speed microscope is an innovative technique called FACED (free-space angular-chirp-enhanced delay imaging) - developed by ProfessorTsai's team earlier. FACED makes use of a pair of parallel mirrors which generate a shower of laser pulses to create a super-fast sweeping laser beam at least 1,000 times faster than the existing laser-scanning methods.

In the experiment, the microscope projected a beam of sweeping laser over the mouse's brain and captured 1,000 to 3,000 full 2D scans of a single mouse brain layer (of the neocortex) every second. To probe the genuine electrical signals that pulse between the neurons, the team inserted a biosensor (protein molecules), developed by Dr Michael Lin of Stanford University, into the neurons of the mouse brain.

.a. Professor Kevin Tsia, Associate Professor of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

"These engineered proteins will light up (or fluoresce) whenever there is a voltage signal passes through the neurons. The emitted light is then detected by the microscope and formed into a 2D image that visualises the locations of these voltage changes," said Professor Tsia.

"This is really an exciting result as we now can peek into the neuronal activities, that were once obscured and could provide the fundamental clues to understanding brain functions and more importantly brain diseases," he added.

Apart from electrical signals, the team also used the microscope to capture the slow-motion of chemical signals in the mouse brain, such as calcium and glutamate, a neurotransmitter, as deep as one-third of a millimeter from the brain's surface.

A notable advantage of this technique is the ability to track the signals that do not trigger the neuron to fire - weak neuronal signals (called sub-threshold signals) that are often difficult to capture and detect, which could also happen in many disease condition in the brain, but have yet been studied in detail because of the lack of high-speed technique like the one developed by the team.

Another important feature of the novel technique is that it is minimally invasive. The classical method for recording electrical firing in the brain is to physically embed or implant electrodes in the brain tissue. However, such physical intrusion could cause damage to the neurons, and can only detect fuzzy signals from a couple of neurons.

"This is so far a one-of-its-kind technology that could detect millisecond-changing activities of individual neurons in the living brain. So, this is, I would say, the cornerstone of neuroscience research to more accurately "decoding" brain signals." Professor Tsia said the team would work to advance the capability of the microscope.

"We are working to further combine other advanced microscopy techniques to achieve imaging at higher resolution, wider view and deeper into the brain in the neocortex, which is about 1 millimeter. This will allow us to probe deeper into the brain for a better and more comprehensive understanding of the functions of the brain." he added.

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A novel wastewater treatment process to effectively remove health hazardous chemical contaminants

Globally, there is a growing concern regarding the presence of trace emerging contaminants such as retinoids and oestrogenic endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in aquatic environments. Retinoids such as retinoic acids and their metabolites, which are the derivatives of vitamin A, can cause abnormal morphological development in amphibians, fish, and snails at elevated levels. Oestrogenic EDCs like alkylphenols and bisphenol A are environmental oestrogens that can induce feminization of male fish and abnormal development in aquatic organisms.

Sewage effluents are a significant source for the continuous input of these contaminants into the aquatic environment. High levels of these chemical contaminants are commonly found in sewage effluents discharged from conventional sewage treatment plants (STPs).

An interdisciplinary team led by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has developed a novel wastewater treatment system that can effectively remove conventional pollutants, and recover valuable resources such as phosphorus and organic materials (i.e., carbon fibres and volatile organic acids).

This novel system combines chemically enhanced primary sedimentation (CEPS) of sewage with acidogenic fermentation of sludge in tandem (Image 1). A series of laboratory experiments were conducted to prove that this novel system can effectively remove trace emerging chemical contaminants from wastewater and is more cost effective compared with conventional wastewater treatment systems.

The results of this study have been recently published in Water Research and Environment International.

Moreover, in collaboration with the Nanshan Sewage Treatment Plant in Shenzhen, a pilot wastewater treatment system (Image 2) adopting the novel treatment process has been under construction in Shenzhen since 2019. It will come into operation and testing by this summer if the COVID-19 outbreak subsides.

Background In the past few years, Professor Xiao-Yan Li of the Department of Civil Engineering who led the interdisciplinary research project, has been collaborating with Professor Kenneth Leung from HKU School of Biological Sciences and the Swire Institute of Marine Science to examine the levels and removal efficiencies of retinoids and oestrogenic EDCs from wastewater by the novel wastewater treatment process developed by the research team, and to compare that with the conventional STPs.

Key Findings The results indicated that the three STPs can only remove an average of 57% of retinoids (range: 41-82%) and an average of 54% of oestrogenic EDCs (range: 31-79%) from wastewater influents (this work was published in Environment International).

Using the novel treatment system operated under laboratory conditions, the CEPS process alone was demonstrated to be 16 -19% more effective in removing retinoids and EDCs than the conventional STPs. 65 - 80% of retinoids and 72 - 73% of EDCs can be removed from the CEPS process.

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After acidogenic fermentation of the CEPS sludge, 50 - 58% of retinoids and 47 - 50% of EDCs were further removed from the supernatants of sludge (this work has been recently published in Water Research).

Compared to the conventional STPs, the novel treatment system integrating CEPS with acidogenic fermentation of sludge is comparatively more efficient in removing emerging chemical contaminants from wastewater, and hence could reduce their environmental impacts.

In terms of cost effectiveness, the CEPS process has been shown, by other studies, to be more cost-effective than the conventional wastewater treatment process. For instance, the cost of CEPS for wastewater treatment is less than a half of that of the secondary wastewater treatment (i.e., activated sludge process). On one hand, acidogenic fermentation of CEPS sludge can further reduce the treatment cost by recovering organic carbon and phosphate resources from the sludge as the harvested organic carbon and phosphate can be utilized to produce carbon fibers and fertilizers respectively. On the other hand, the acidogenic fermentation of CEPS sludge can provide additional removal of pollutants. The novel treatment process, therefore, offers win-win outcomes.

The Way Forward Professor Li, who led the study, said:"When the pilot wastewater treatment system in Shenzhen comes into operation and testing, we hope to demonstrate that this innovative technology will use less energy, generate cleaner effluent and recover more useful materials from the sludge."

Professor Leung said,"We are very pleased to gather evidence for supporting our hypothesis that our novel sewage treatment system can effectively remove the emerging chemical contaminants. With the scaled-up pilot plant in Shenzhen, we will further investigate the removal efficiency of other classes of common pollutants by this novel t reatment system."

Regarding its potential application in Hong Kong, Professor Li added,"Our system can be easily retrofitted onto the existing STPs in Hong Kong, like add-on units. For instance, the pilot system will be connected to the existing Nanshan STP in Shenzhen to test its performance. If successful, this will pave the way for advancing wastewater treatment in China and beyond."

This innovative research is funded by Theme-based Research Scheme of Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR.

Inauguration of HKU-Oxford Partnership in Quantum Information and Computation

HKU-Oxford MoU Inauguration Ceremuny

Initiated by the Quantum Information and Computation Initiative (QICI) of the Computer Science Department, HKU Faculty of Engineering, the quantum groups at the Computer Science Departments ofThe University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the University of Oxford recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The MoU consolidates a long-standing collaboration between the Oxford Quantum Group and the Quantum Information, Foundations, and Technologies Group at HKU to establish an "HKU-Oxford Joint Lab for Quantum Information and Computation':ln addition, the collaboration will include the exchange of mutual research visits, joint participation in grant applications, and joint supervision of PhD students in order to facilitate the exchange of talents between the two partner groups and the training of young researchers in the growing area of quantum information and computation.

An MoU signing ceremony was in January 2020 at HKU. It was attended by HKU Acting- Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Alfonso Ngan, HKU Dean of Engineering Professor Christopher Chao, Joint Head of the Quantum Group at the University of Oxford Professor Bob Coecke, HKU Head of Department of Computer Science Professor Lam Tak-Wah, Director of HKU Quantum Information and Computation Initiative (QICI) Professor Giulio Chiribella and members of the HKU and Oxford groups. Professor Alfonso Ngan and Professor Bob Coecke introduced the background and motivation of the HKU-Oxford partnership at the ceremony. Professor Ngan also expressed the strong support of HKU to this collaboration.

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.A. A group photo taken at the MoU signing ceremony. Back row: (from left) Professor Lam Tak-Wah, Professor Giulio Chiribella, Professor Christopher Chao and Dr Reynold Cheng. Front row: (from left) Professor Bob Coecke and Professor Alfonso Ngan.

Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of HKU Engineering, said "The establishment of the MoU with the University of Oxford is an important step for the research and development of quantum information and computation within the Faculty of Engineering of HKU. We have high expectations for the collaboration with the Oxford Quantum Group, and for the establishment of a Joint Lab for Quantum Information and Computation. It will push forward the boundaries of our knowledge of quantum information, and will lead to potentially disruptive new technologies."

Under the MoU, members of the Joint Lab will have opportunities to spend extended visits and conduct research on the broad spectrum of topics covered by the quantum groups at the two universities. Hier Kristjansson, PhD Student at the University of Oxford, said: "The HKU-Oxford collaboration provides a unique opportunity for students at both universities to be immersed in the vibrant academic community and traditions in the University of Oxford, whilst also experiencing the innovative research and cosmopolitan city life in Hong Kong."

Furthermore, the HKU and Oxford quantum groups have recently been awarded a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which provides them with funding to hire joint postdoctoral fellows. With the support of the grant, a workshop on the intersection between quantum information and quantum gravity was held in 2020 in Hong Kong.

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The University of Hong Kong Standard Chartered Foundation

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A Synergistic Partnership between Academia and Industry to steer FinTech development and groom world-class talents

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) Limited are proud to jointly announce the establishment of The University of Hong Kong - Standard Chartered Hong Kong 150th Anniversary Community Foundation FinTech Academy (HKU-SCF FinTech Academy) with a generous support of HK$60 million from the Standard Chartered Hong Kong 150th Anniversary Community Foundation (SCF).

Leveraging the combined strength of academics and industry to enhance and expand the way FinTech is taught, researched, and innovated, the HKU-SCF FinTech Academy is hosted by the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Engineering and strongly supported by the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Business and Economics. It aims to st imulate cutting-edge research and teaching of information technology in financial services, and make a sustainable impact on the financial services sectors of Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area.

The HKU-SCF Fin Tech Academy will nurture talents through the recently launched Bachelor's degree in Financial Technology [(BASc (FinTech)J and a brand-new interdisciplinary Master's degree in Financial Technology in 2021. This will increase the annual intake to meet the dual demands of students and industry. In the next five years, the HKU-SCF Fin Tech Academy will gear up nearly a thousand FinTech professionals to tackle disruptive technologies, creating a tangible and lasting impact on the banking and financial industry. The partnership and funding provided through the HKU-SCF FinTech Academy will strongly facilitate HKU's research in Fin Tech.

"The fast pace of change in Fin Tech has been impacting not just the business model of banks, but also the talents required for realising the Smart Banking ambitions for Hong Kong. Standard Chartered is proud to steer the co-creation of the FinTech Academy between HKU and SCF to cultivate future-fit talents and upskill bankers with disruptive technologies to capture the

immense opportunities. We feel very excited about this pioneering partnership with HKU that will transform Hong Kong's banking industry and the wider financial ecosystem ahead of the Fin Tech era." Ms Mary Huen, CEO, Hong Kong, Standard Chartered; and Trustee, Standard Chartered Hong Kong 150th Anniversary Community Foundation.

"With the continuous advancement of technology, the financial industry is evolving dynamically and the next wave of disruption is coming. HKU has first-class FinTech research teams across the Faculties of Engineering, Law, and Business and Economics, working synergistically in various areas including blockchain, cybersecurity, regulatory technology, Al and big data analytics. The HKU-SCF Fin Tech Academy will be a centre of innovation for nurturing talents to shape the Fin Tech industry across the region and strengthen Hong Kong's position as a leading financial centre." Professor Xiang Zhang, President and Vice-Chancellor, The University of Hong Kong.

"The Department of Computer Science at HKU Engineering has pioneered various research projects in Fin Tech related areas. The HKU-SCF FinTech Academy provides a platform for us to consolidate and develop new R&D projects, which has gained the support from the Research Matching Grant Scheme of the Government as well as from the industry and will create more opportunities, including scholarships and internships, for students. We look forward to working with SCF on this venture." Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of HKU Engineering.

The HKU-SCF FinTech Academy will adopt a multi-faceted approach including Massive Open Online Courses (MOO(), encompassing talent development and research through a wide range of academic, industry and community engagement activities, and targeting to benefit hundreds of thousands of people, local or worldwide, interested in Fin Tech.

imseCAVE VR technology zooms into interactive teaching and learning

~ Interactive online teaching and learning platform shows the interactivity between teachers and students in real-time (top) while teacher and teaching assistant can respond to students directly through the on line teaching and learning cyberspace.

With the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus, the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering has deployed an innovative interactive platform based on internet technology and virtual reality (VR) to deliver online teaching and learning, in order to reduce contact among students.

At the beginning of February after the Chinese New Year this year, the Department has completed the setup of the interactive platform. Two courses, including one from the Industrial Engineering curriculum - Virtual Reality of Systems Engineering (IMSE3137) and a HKU Common Core course - Virtual Worlds, Real Bodies (CCHU9056), have made use of the online video communication platform Zoom (www.zoom.us) and the imseCAVE VR technology (www.hactis.com) based on research and development from HKU researchers at the Department of IMSE with support from the Innovation and Technology Commission and Industrial collaborators. The platform enables teachers and students to communicate and exchange knowledge in an interactive virtual environment over the Internet.

The platform facilitates teaching and learning over the cyberspace which overcomes geographical limitation and across different hardware platforms, including smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. Professors and teaching assistants can deliver course materials and multimedia contents, such as videos, 3D-images and VR scenarios, by using imseCAVE, various

<II Interactive online teaching and learning platform shows the interactivity between teachers and students in real-time (top) while teacher and teaching assistant can respond to students directly through the on line teaching and learning cyberspace.

<II A 3D LED presentation setup based on the imseCAVE VR technology for online teaching and learning in real-time with students.

software and white board simultaneously. While professors are going through the presentation, students can use real-time tele-text applications to post their questions and obtain real-time responses from professors and fellow classmates.

Dr Henry Lau, Associate Dean of Engineering (Innovation), said, "Since the launch of the platform in February, students have actively participated in the online cyber-classroom, with many more Q&A discussion sessions going on as well as a high participation rate, Le.over 80% in both courses that are using this platform 1 ."

Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of HKU Engineering, is impressed by the overwhelming support from students. He said, "This initiative enhances the student engagement in the online classroom, and pretty much pave the way for an effective interactive on line teaching and learning paradigm. We hope this platform can be popularised among other departments and faculties in the future."

CAVE system to promote safety awareness in industrial training Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering and the Occupational Safety & Health Council (OSH) co-developed a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. The system applies VR technology on a 3D interface to create immersive virtual environments on a 4 meter x 4 meter dynamic platform. It can stimulate a gliding ramp, with addition of wind effect and trace device to stimulate industrial accident scenes in 4D Virtual Reality experience. With the VR headsets, trainees can immerse into a real working environment such as the truss-out bamboo scaffold work environment, to experience an accident safely in the system, so as to realise the importance of adhering to safety measures. Deployed in the OSH lmmersive Experience Hall, the CAVE has been used by over 1,500 trainees since it was introduced in December 2019.

<1111 The CAVE system has been used by more than 1,500 tra inees at the OSH lmmersive Experience Hall.

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William Mong Distinguished Lecture on .... Filtration Solutions to Mitigate Coronavirus Aerosol and PM2.5 Pollutants'' The outbreak of the Coronavirus is still severe all over the world and people are very eager to know how we can control the spread of the virus and reduce pollutants. The Faculty is honoured to have Professor David Pui, a world-leading expert in this field, to deliver an online William Mong Distinguished Lecture on April 17, 2020.

Professor David Pui, Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the director of the University of Minnesota's Particle Technology Laboratory (PTL), one of the leading fine particle research centers in the US, as well as the Center for Filtration Research (CFR), shared the development offiltration solutions to mitigate coronavirus spreading and reduce PM2.5 pollutants.

Virtual Admissions Sessions for JU PAS Applicants 2020 Aiming at giving more information to the local and non-local applicants, the Faculty organised a series of virtual talk to promote undergraduate studies since March, 2020. The talks were focused on different aspects, including "Innovating a Better Future';"Engineering Across the Fields and Over the Seas';"An Exceptional Engineering Study Experience';"Engineering Everywhere';"The Masters of Problem Solving" and "How can Engineers change the world': Besides, members of the Engineering Admissions Committee were invited to join the Q&A sessions and answered questions from the potential students.

.t. The series of virtual admissions talk was kick-started by Dr Henry Lau (left), Associate Dean of Engineering (Innovation) and Professor Kenneth Wong (right), Chairman of Engineering Admissions Committee .

.t. Professor Anderson Shum (1st from right), Associate Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering, talked about the interdisciplinary research of HKU Engineering. It also includes inspired student sharing by Angel Yan (middle) and Immanuel William Suryowidagdo (1st from left).

<II Professor Kenneth Wong (Chairman of Engineering Admissions Committee), Professor Thomas Ng (Associate Dean of Engineering (Student Development)), Professor Christopher Chao (Dean of Engineering), Dr Hayden So (Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) and Professor Edmund Lam (Associate Dean of Engineering (Teaching and Learning -UG) hosted the'Virtual Admission Sessions for JUPAS 2020 Applicants"in June.

.& The VAYU Project set the new Guinness world record for "The Fastest 50m Swim by a Robotic Fish" on January 23, 2020, in Shenzhen.

VAYU Project set new Guinness World Record for 1111The Fastest 50m Swim by a Robotic Fish'' Supported by the Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing(lnno Wing), a VAYU robotic fish project developed by a student team from the Faculty of Engineering set the Guinness World Record of 26.79s for "The Fastest SOm Swim by a Robotic Fish" on January 23, 2020. Compared with the world records set by human swimmers in long course swimming pools ratified by International Swimming Federation (FINA), the robotic fish swim faster than women in breaststroke (29.40s) and backstroke (26.98s).

Robotic technology provides us with the power to explore the unknown and save human beings from life-risking tasks. However, current technology is still far from being able to recreate a robotic fish with high swimming speeds of natural fishes in open water, which has gone through millions of years of natural evolution. Although scientists have created fast-swimming fishlike-robots under steady laboratory environments, it forgoes the challenge of an open sea, where firstly, it needs to be self-contained to complete a long distance swim and secondly, to deal with the complex dynamics of the ocean.

Led by the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the VAYU Project is a joint effort with the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering and Computer Science of the Faculty of Engineering. More than 40 students contributed to the project over the years, and the fish development theme has made its way into several final year projects and student research projects, including a sponsored BREED project under the lnno Wing."This project attempts to push the boundary of our understanding of robotic fishes in the real world, mimicking the behavior of real biological fishes for oceanic exploration, and as a platform for further research on natural aquatic species behaviors," said Dr Wang Zheng, supervisor of the project.

The Project was first initiated by a BEng(CE) student, now a graduate, Sidhant Gupta. He wanted to develop a fast swimming, self-contained robotic fish which is capable of traversing long distances. He was aiming to have the fish complete a SOm swim in a long course pool within 30 seconds, while having a biomimetic propulsion specifically an undulating caudal fin. He then established a team with Shen Zhong, a PhD student of Mechanical

Engineering.At the end of 2017,Mr.Timothy Ng,a recent graduate from BEng(ME), took over the role as the project lead and brought the fish to its current record breaking performance. "We had worked on this project for four years. Throughout the years, with the team constantly evolving and growing, several prototypes have been developed and a few attempts have been made to reach the 30s target," said Timothy."The biggest challenge is how to start building a record-breaking fish. We chose to copy the natural movements of a fish which is something robots have tried to avoid in the past, but we felt it was a pathway worth exploring. After a few successful iterations on the prototypes, we had our first ever attempt in November 2017 at the HKU Stanley Ho Sports Center and achieved the closest attempt to the world record, SOm in 34s,4 seconds short of the existing record."

The robotic fish went through drastic changes as the team strived to find a balance between its speed, weight, durability and reliability. After several failed attempts with different prototypes like "White Fish; "Fat Tuna Fish" and "Yellow Tail '; the team eventually managed to instill the strength of stainless steel into 3D printed plastic, a much lighter material, and developed the latest prototype"OMEGA Fish''.

The team carried out a series oftests with "OMEGA Fish" in January 2020 at the CUHK Shenzhen Natatorium in Mainland China. They successfully made a world record-breaking time of 00:26:79S'for a SOm swim on January 23. After reviewing the full set of records and evidence, the Guinness World Record Organisation officially recognised the VAYU Project with its new world record "The Fastest SOm Swim by a Robotic Fish" of 26.79s.

Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of Engineering, is proud of the team's achievement. He said, "Breaking a world record is not an easy task. We are so excited about the breakthrough they made. It is a result of collective effort of students from different disciplines. It is also a good example of how our students apply their professional knowledge to develop solutions with real-world impact. With this record, we hope to raise public interest in ocean exploration. We also aim to make these types of robotics projects an annual challenge among our team."

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-Team Hollo crowned 2020 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Champion

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Team Hollo won the 2020 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Champion with a mental health companion web application leveraging Azure analytics and Al services to advance youth therapy practices.This is the first team from Hong Kong to have won the World Champion since the launch of the Microsoft Imagine Cup in 2003. Piyush Jha and Ajit Krishna Namakkal Raghavendran, two of the co-founders, are BEng(CompSc) final year students. The other co-founder, Cameron Xavier Van Breda, is from Biotechnology.

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The team noticed that mental health aid was not reaching the younger generations in their communities effectively and envision a future of tech-based, accessible, and comprehensive mental health management tools. With this in mind, Team Hollo developed a mental health companion web application leveraging Azure analytics and Al services to advance youth therapy practices.

Over 28,000 students from more than 200 countries registered to take part in the Microsoft Imagine Cup and only 10 teams were selected for the Asia Regional Final. Earlier in February this year, Hollo had won the title of World Finalist in the Asia Regional Final with their impactful solution.In winning the World Champion, the team won USD100,000,a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella,and USDS0,000 in Azure grants.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup aims to empower students to use their imagination and passion for technology to develop innovative and inclusive solutions that tackle key societal issues. Held online this year due to the pandemic, it is the first time a Hong Kong team took home the Cup, often called the "Olympics of student tech competitions."

HKU spin-off company Fano Labs and student team ClearBot won Jumpstarter 2020 Global Pitch Competition

HKU spin-off company Fano Labs Limited has been selected as one of the top five winning teams in the Jumpstarter 2020 Global Pitch Competition organised by Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. More than 500 teams from all over the world participate in the competition. The top five teams are awarded up to US$5 million in investment commitments, as well as a total cash prize of US$100,000.

Meanwhile, HKU student team ClearBot has won the championship in Jumpstarter IDEAPOP!, a pitching competition for students from universities in Hong Kong. ClearBot is an artificial intelligence-driven robotic system that automatically collects plastic waste in water, providing a solution to dispose of marine waste plastic.

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Engineering teams bagged prizes at The 6th Hong Kong University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition The Faculty of Engineering bagged nine prizes in total with two First Prize at the 6th Hong Kong University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition by the Hong Kong New Generation Cultural Association.

"Al Hand washing'; developed by Andy Kong Chung-to (PhD, Department of Computer Science), Chen Wei and Jiang Yanqing (MSc students in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), topped the list of "Innovation - Information Technology" category. The team uses machine learning to provide real-time feedback of hand cleanliness during and after washing hands. It can also store the cleanliness index and RFID data with timestamp in the database for future analysis.

A team comprised of Zhang Yage, Yang Chentianyi and Guo Wei won the other First Prize in the category of"lnnovation - Math. & Phy. / Mechanics & Control System''. Their project "A study of Electro-coalescence of Non-wetting Droplets and Their Application is a scientific investigation on how electrostatic force trigger the coalescence of liquid marbles. The project was under the supervision of Professor Anderson Shum of Department of Mechanical Engineering.

HKU Teams had received 19 awards in the competition. The winners of the Innovation Category and Entrepreneurship Category will have the opportunity to represent the HKSAR to participate in the"Challenge Cup","lnternet+" or"ChuangQingChun"National Contests in Mainland China.

The list of awardees of HKU Faculty of Engineering:~

"Innovation - Information Technology" Category

Award J Project Name J Name of Participant(s)

First Prize Al Hand Washing Kong Chung To (CS, PhD), Chen Wei (EEE, MSc), Jiang Yanqing (EEE, MSc)

"Innovation - Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering" category

Award Project Name Name of Participant(s)

Second Automatic microplastics detector Zhu Yan min (EEE, PhD) Prize by deep learning assisted digital

holography

Second Load Forecasting for unit Cheng Yau Chung (EEE, PhD) Prize commitment with renewable

energy integration

"Entrepreneurship - Entrepreneurship Proposal" Category

Award Project Name Name of Participant(s)

Second Prize

ReBot - Rehabilitation Robot Yu Zekun (EEE, MSc), Xue Zian (EEE, MSc), Zhang Xinyi (EEE, MSc), Li Ziwei (EEE, MSc), Zhao Xinqi (EEE, MSc), Li Yang (FBE, Master)

"Innovation - Math. & Phy./ Mechanics & Control System" Category

Award Project Name Name of Participant(s)

First Prize A study of Electro-coalescence of Zhang Yage (ME, PhD), Non-wetting Droplets and Their Yang Chentianyi (UG, I ELM), Application Guo Wei (ME, PhD)

Second Fast Swimming Robotic Fish for Liu Qimeng, Prize underwater exploration Shen Zhong (ME, PhD)

"Innovation - Life Sciences" Category

Award Project Name Name of Participant(s)

Third Prize A Droplet Microfluidics-based Approach for Screening and Development of new RNA Fluorogenic Aptamer

Third Prize DirectThermal Charging Cell

Guo Wei (ME, PhD), Zhang Yage (ME, PhD)

Shen Zhong (ME, PhD), Zhong Hua (ME, PhD) Li Jing (ME, PhD) Zhang Runzhi (ME, PhD) Zhao Yafei (ME, RA) Dr Wang Zheng (ME)

Huang Yu Ting (ME, PhD), Wu Xinya (ME, PhD), Pang Chun Lin (ME, PhD), Dr Feng Shien-Ping (ME)

Turning ideas into business

Project Lumino, a cost-efficient one-stop solution to the barrier-free movement for the visually impaired, has just been selected by the Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Programme of Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. Supervised by Dr Vincent Tam of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the project received numerous awards including the Second Prize at the "2018 China Collegiate Computing Contest - 3rd Mobile Application Innovation Contest" co-organised by Zhejiang University and Apple Inc.

The Science and Technology Entrepreneur Programme (STEP) is a one-year startup support programme designed to nurture tech-focused entrepreneurs to become successful startups and help them turn their brilliant ideas into reality. The founders Wong Chi-ping Desmond and Wong Kwong-yat Felix, BEng(CE) students, will be receiving a start-up supporting seed fund of HKl OOK, one year support and co-working space offered by Hong Kong Science and Technology Park.

A The project was selected as one of the best projects at the Faculty's 1st Engineering lnnoShow. (From left) Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of Engineering, presented the award to Wong Kwong-yat Felix and Wong Chi-ping Desmond.

Award at the Communications Competition organised by the Institution of Civil Engineers

A (From left) Dr Ryan Wong.Jacky Lee, Gordon Leung, Kenny Siu and Head of Department of Civil Engineering Professor Francis Au.

Team COMpromlCE, formed by BEng(CivE) Year 3 students Siu King-hay Kenny, Lee Wai-chung Jacky, Leung Jing-shang Gordon and a student from Faculty of Architecture was awarded the First-runner up at the Communications Competition organised by the Institution of Civil Engineers.

The group-based competition comprised of three rounds, which aims to promote effective communication between different parties in infrastructural development projects. The team had to prepare multimedia printable as well as consultation strategy documents for the competition. Eventually, the team presented their make-up civil engineering project at a mock public consultation meeting, followed by responding to different parties' concerns in the virtual project.

The team thought that it was a great opportunity to brush their soft skills throughout the competition,"Not only did we compose an attractive leaflet interestingly, but we also had to present technical civil engineering concepts in a laymen way, which is equally challenging to us. We thought that it was a valuable experiential learning experience, which facilitated the development of our holistic understanding of the technical knowledge taught in class."

Silver Prize at FinTech Awards 2019 in Universities

Samson Lam Fong-pui (1st from left), BEng(CompSc) Year 4 student, won the Silver Prize at Fin Tech Awards 2019 in Universities. Samson and his teammates from HKUST, CUHK and HKU Faculty of Business and Economics, developed a proprietary mobile application named "ZOOMIN" that contributes to the reduction of waste at source through gamifying the users' consumption journey and rewarding sustainable consumption.

Champion of HKU Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition

Congratulations to Muyan Wu (right), PhD student of Professor D.Y.C. Leung in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, for winning the HKU Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition.

Initiated by The Graduate School and Knowledge Exchange Office (KEO) of The University of Hong Kong in 2011, the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition is an annual academic competition that challenges research postgraduate (RPg) students to explain their research within three minutes to a general audience. The competition of this year was successfully held on June 23, 2020, with 20 PhD, MPhil and PD students participated in it. Muyan Wu presented her thesis entitled uAn Efficient Way to Get Rid of Smells after Indoor Decoration" and won the Champion.

2nd Runner-up at HSBC x HKFYG A.I. Future Tense lnnoTech Solutions Pitching

Samson Lam Fong-pui (left), BEng(CompSc) Year 4 student, formed a team "Luk Advisor" with two students from HKUST and PolyU and was awarded the Second Runner-up in the HSBC Future Skills Development Project -A.I. Future Tense lnnoTech Solutions Pitching. Their winning idea "Eldeep" is an all-rounded software safeguarding elderly health with advanced Computer Vision and loT (Internet of Things) technology. The competition was organized by the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and sponsored by HSBC.

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HKU Engineering leads strategic public policy research on MiC supply chain in the Greater Bay Area for HK development

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Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities with the largest number of high-rise buildings in the world. The ambitious development plans set by the HKSAR Government for various building sectors such as public and private housing,elderly homes, hostel, hospital and hotel will strengthen Hong Kong's leadership in the Greater Bay Area and beyond, but at the same time it also pose challenges to the capacity and capability of the construction industry in the city.

The 2018 Policy Address promotes the wide use of Modular Integrated Construction (MiC) for enhancing quality, productivity, safety and competitiveness of building and construction. Nevertheless, the adoption of MiC is being challenged by complex and dynamic policy issues in areas including transportation and logistics, innovation and technology, financial services, creative industry, environmental protection, building safety, nurturing talent, healthcare, land and housing, labour and welfare. It is thus vital and important to build a favourable business environment with policy roadmap and action plan to enhance the MiC supply chain for Hong Kong development.

A multidisciplinary team led by Professor Wei Pan of Department of Civil Engineering of Faculty of has been awarded the Strategic Public Policy Research (SPPR) funding scheme of over HK$4 million by the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office of the HKSAR Government for a research project to enhance MiC supply chain in the Greater Bay Area for Hong Kong development. The project team also includes Professor Francis Au, Professor S.C. Wong, Professor Thomas Ng and Professor George Huang of HKU, Professor Ben Young and Professor Daniel Ng from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor Cheng Su, Dr Sanyuan Niu and Dr Xiaojing Zhao from Mainland China. Over a four-year period, the team will address a number of research areas such as MiC, supply chain management and public policy by adopting mixed research methods like GBA-wide questionnaire surveys, focus groups, workshops, modelling, scenario analysis and policy forum.

Professor Wei Pan, who is also the Executive Director of the University's Centre for Innovation in Construction and Infrastructure Development (CICID), said, "This research is the first-of-its-kind to strategically and holistically address the multi-policy areas about MiC supply chain. The project is supported by a wide range of policy bureaus, departments, industry and organisations in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to ensure robust validation of the findings and maximise the impact of the research."

The project is expected to propose strategies for MiC supply chain identification and enhancement; to provide a systemic measurement framework with key performance indicators for MiC supply chain selection and evaluation; to develop a 'demand-and-supply' predictive model with scenarios; and to recommend a public policy roadmap with action plan on MiC supply chain. These outcomes will contribute to the knowledge, practice and policymaking of MiC supply chains in the wide community of HK and the GBA.

"Centre for Innovation in Construction and Infrastructure Development has been taking a world-leading role in the research area of construction innovation and technology particularly for MiC. I believe this research can further facilitate the implementation of MiC in Hong Kong and enhance the productivity and sustainability for the industry and community," said by Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of Engineering.

Government has been actively promoting and leading the construction industry for wider adoption of MiC with a view to uplift works efficiency, safety and quality performance. This strategic public policy research led by the Centre for Innovation in Construction and Infrastructure Development of HKU's Department of Civil Engineering is very timely and will contribute positively to enhancing the MiC supply chain in the GBA for the development of Hong Kong'; said by Ir Lam Sai Hung, the Permanent Secretary for Development (Works) of the HKSAR Government.

Research Impact J;und 2019-20 awarded to MRI Technologies for Accessible Healthcare

Congratulations to Professor Ed Wu, Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, for being one of the 11 awardees of Research Impact Fund 2019-20. Professor Wu will led the project "Ultra-Light and Ultra-Low-Power MRI Technologies for Accessible Healthcare"for the next 60 months.

Research Impact Fund (RIF) was first introduced by the Research Grants Council in Academic Year 2018-19, aiming to encourage local academics to articulate the potential of research to deliver benefit for the wider community through more impactful and translational research project. This is the second consecutive year that academics in HKU Faculty of Engineering to receive funding from this scheme.

Professor- James Lam appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers

Professor James Lam, Chair Professor of Control Engineering at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering.

Systems and control studies provide a unifying framework for a wide range of engineering disciplines and industrial applications. The Journal of Systems and Control Engineering is a peer reviewed journal that reflects this diversity by giving prominence to experimental application and industrial studies.

Named as one of the "Highly Cited Researchers" by Clarivate Analytics for six consecutive years since 2014, Professor Lam is also the Editor-in-Chief of IET Control Theory and Applications and Journal ofThe Franklin Institute.

Tensor-l=low funding Award

Dr Kenneth Wong of the Department of Computer Science received a funding award from TensorFlow for updating the syllabus and developing course materials of "COMP3317 Computer Vision".

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning which includes a deep learning library. The goal for the awards is to support the design, development, and execution of machine learning courses that include a practical component using open source libraries.

Taught Postgraduate Programmes • Master of Science in Engineering in Building Services Engineering

• Master of Science in Engineering in Electrical and Electronic Engineering

• Master of Science in Engineering in Energy Engineering

• Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering • Master of Science in Engineering in Environmental Engineering

• Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Engineering • Master of Science in Engineering in Geotechnical Engineering

• Bachelor of Engineering in Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management • Master of Science in Engineering in Industrial Engineering and

• Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering

• Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering

• Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering Science

• Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Financial Technology

• Global Engineering and Business

•;JM¥id@Mi·lft·®t1Al·t·lfi,,i,,t4f • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

• Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

Logistics Management

• Master of Science in Engineering in Infrastructure Project Management

• Master of Science in Engineering in Mechanical Engineering

• Master of Science in Engineering in Structural Engineering

• Master of Science in Engineering in Transportation Engineering

• Master of Science in Computer Science

• Master of Science in Electronic Commerce and Internet Computing

• Master of Science in Financial Technology and Data Analytics (Proposed implementation date: Fa/12021 J

.· . . .. . -· ,. '~

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