Construction work for the 5th phase of the Student Hostel project at Whitehead, Ma On Shan officially commenced on 14 March. The project is expected to be completed in Q2 of 2026, providing more than 2,000 bed spaces for CityU’s undergraduates and postgraduates.

The project has adopted advanced construction technology called Modular Integrated Construction (MiC), which involves over 1,300 modules in the overall building complex. It is currently the world’s largest student hostel project to have adopted MiC technology, calculated by the number of bed spaces.

CityU is ranked 7th among the world’s top young universities according to the Nature Index 2021 Young Universities, issued by the leading academic publisher Springer Nature. The results of the index reaffirm that CityU’s strengths are recognised internationally. The Nature Index Young Universities ranks universities under 50 years of age based on their faculty members’ article count and share in 82 of the most influential academic journals in natural sciences over the past year.

The Bright Future Engineering Talent Hub has been established at the College of Engineering (CENG) thanks to a generous donation of HK$4 million from the Bright Future Charitable Foundation. CityU plans to collaborate with secondary and primary schools on nurturing engineering professionals through the 24-month STEM education programme to be offered by the Hub. One of the key features of this programme is to recruit secondary students as interns for research projects conducted by CENG students and professors.

Four research projects led by CityU scholars received grants worth HK$20.26 million from the government’s inaugural Green Tech Fund. In terms of the number of projects and total amount of grants, CityU earned the top position among all local universities. The projects are led by Professor Henry Chung Shu-hung, Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, Professor Chan Chak-keung, Dean and Chair Professor of Atmospheric Environment in the School of Energy and Environment (SEE), Professor Alex Jen Kwan-yue, Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy and Lee Shau Kee Chair Professor of Materials Science, and Dr Ng Yun-hau, Associate Professor of SEE.

Professor Kuo Tei-Wei, Lee Shau Kee Chair Professor of Information Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering, has been elected as a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Natural Sciences class. Professor Kuo is a pioneer in systems and software designs of non-volatile memory, especially on flash-memory storage systems.

Professor Yan Hong, Wong Chun Hong Professor of Data Engineering and Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, has been elected Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in recognition of his highly innovative work in advancing technological and economic developments. He will be inducted at the NAI Eleventh Annual Meeting in June 2022.

Dr Li Danfeng, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, and Dr Wang Cheng, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, were shortlisted for MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35) China. They are the only two awardees in Hong Kong. TR35 elects 35 leading figures under the age of 35 from all over the world who have had a profound impact on the future development of science and technology.

New types of behavioural addiction related to a possible over-reliance on the use of digital technologies are now regarded as mental health disorders, according to Professor Matthew Lee Kwok-on, Chair Professor of Information Systems and Electronic Commerce and Vice-President (Development & External Relations), speaking at the latest installment of the President’s Lecture Series: Excellence in Academia in January. His online talk was titled “Why are we so addicted to cyber worlds? From Tamagotchi to metaverse”.

Metals usually soften when they expand under heating, but a CityU-co-led research team has discovered a first-of-its-kind super-elastic alloy that can retain its stiffness even after being heated to 1,000 K (about 727 ºC) or above, with nearly zero energy dissipation. The team believes that the alloy can be applied in manufacturing high-precision devices for space missions. The team was co-led by Professor Yang Yong from CityU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the findings were published in Nature.

Large-scale COVID-19 testing for small mammals is the focus of an exciting new partnership between CityU and the major global diagnostics and genetic testing company Prenetics. The tests will be conducted by trained staff from the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (VMC) and the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences on site at the VMC, the largest veterinary clinic in Asia. Technology provided by Prenetics will be used for the testing process at the CityU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

Professor Wang Zuankai, Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was one of the recipients of the 2021 Green Tech Award organised by the Meituan Green Tech Fund for his innovative multidisciplinary research on low carbon cooling and nature-inspired engineering. His research will have a profound impact on addressing the global carbon emission problem.

A research team co-led by CityU recently developed an innovative human-machine interface (HMI) that can teleoperate robots to imitate the user’s actions and perform complicated tasks. The breakthrough technology demonstrates the potential for conducting COVID-19 swab tests and nursing patients with infectious diseases. A key part of the advanced HMI system, named Robotic VR, is the flexible, multi-layered electronic skin developed by Dr Yu Xinge, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and his team.

Infection and mortality rates for COVID-19 could be significantly reduced if high-income countries donated 46% of their COVID-19 vaccine stocks to low- and middle-income countries, according to a team led by Dr Zhang Qingpeng, Associate Professor in the School of Data Science. This action will better protect high-income countries in the long run and reduce outbreaks of COVID-19 variants. This estimation is based on a mathematical model developed by the team.

A correlation exists between the weather and humidity that patients are exposed to during different stages of COVID-19 infection and the probability of death, according to Dr Sean Yuan Hsiang-yu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and PhD student Liang Jing-bo. Using mathematical models combined with statistical analysis, the team has estimated the correlation between COVID-19 case fatality rates and temperature and relative humidity based on the number of confirmed cases and deaths in eight European countries; and data for temperature and relative humidity.

The inappropriate disposal of surgical masks could cause serious microplastic pollution, equivalent to polluting more than 54,800 Olympic swimming pools of seawater annually, researchers from CityU have discovered. The growth and reproduction of marine organisms could be affected, too. The research paper has been published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters. The corresponding author is Dr Henry He Yuhe, Assistant Professor in the School of Energy and Environment and a member of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution.

In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today?

Charting a course through Greek tragic thought, cybernetic logic, and the aesthetics of Chinese landscape painting, Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge to art and philosophy posed by contemporary technological transformation. How might a renewed understanding of the varieties of experience of art be possible in the face of discourses surrounding artificial intelligence and robotics? Departing from Hegel’s thesis on the end of art and Heidegger’s assertion of the end of philosophy, Art and Cosmotechnics travels an unfamiliar trajectory of thought to arrive at a new relation between art and technology. The book will be translated into Chinese, German and Spanish in 2022.

Exploring essential concepts, theories, and formulations of phase-only Fresnel holograms, this book provides comprehensive coverage of modern methods for generating such holograms, which paves the way for commercial products such as compact holographic projectors, heads-up displays, and data security enhancement. Relevant MATLAB codes allow readers to implement and evaluate the theories and formulations of different methods, and can be used as aquick-start framework for further research and development. This is a crucial and up-to-date treatment of phase-only Fresnel holograms for students and researchers in electrical and electronic engineering, computer science/engineering, applied physics, information technology, and multimedia technology, as well as engineers and scientists in industry developing new products on 3-D displays and holographic projection.