New appointments
Professor Richard Yuen Kwok-kit has been appointed Chief-of-Staff with effect from 27 December 2019. Professor Yuen is Chair Professor of Architectural Engineering in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering.
Professor Joe Qin Sizhao has been appointed Chair Professor of Data Science and Dean of the School of Data Science. Professor Qin joined CityU on 2 January 2020. He obtained his BS and MS degrees in Automation from Tsinghua University (China), and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, US.
Professor David Joseph Srolovitz has been appointed Head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) with effect from 1 January 2020. Professor Srolovitz is Chair Professor of Materials Science in MSE and Senior Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study.
Distinguished lecture
Particles in the air smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) can reach deep into the lungs and even the circulatory system. Studies show a close link between exposure to such fine particles and premature death from heart and lung disease. Professor David Y. H. Pui, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering; Regents Professor and LM Fingerson/TSI Inc Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, US, will discuss his work on technologies for atmospheric measurements that have helped to establish the PM2.5 standard in the US. His talk “Green Technologies for Sustainable Environment” will take place on 17 January. Please visit here for more details.
Kudos
Professor Tamás Waliczky of the School of Creative Media (SCM) has been awarded the Prima Primissima Prize. It is the highest award that Hungary can bestow on an individual in any field. Professor Waliczky, an animation and new media artist, was named in the field of Fine Arts.
Dr Max Hattler, Assistant Professor of SCM, won the Best Abstract Film Award for his work Matter and Motion at the London International Animation Festival 2019. Dr Hattler is a media artist working primarily with animation and audio-visual performance.
Dr Wang Feng, Associate Professor, and Professor He Jr-Hau, both of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, were awarded the Asian Rising Star lectureship medal at the 18th Asian Chemical Congress. Dr Wang researches nano- and micro-structural materials comprising luminescent lanthanides for applications in biology and photonics. Professor He, an expert in optoelectronics, has contributed significantly to our understanding of light–matter interaction through his achievements in the photon management of light-harvesting devices.
Undergraduates from CityU’s Department of Computer Science (CS) won First Place Award in the highly competitive “Track 3: Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service on SGX” of the iDASH Privacy & Security Workshop 2019 — Secure Genome Analysis Competition. Dr Wang Cong, Associate Professor in CS was one of the supervisors. The CityU students were Huang Zixuan and Liang Qiyuan. The joint team from CityU and Zhejiang University outperformed teams from Baidu X-lab and Google, Ant Financial Service Group, China, and ByteDance. The competition was organised by the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of California, San Diego; the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; and the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University.
Zeng Zhi, a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Ted Chow Chi-yin, Associate Professor in CS, and Dr Zhang Jiadong, a 2015 PhD graduate, received the Best Paper Award for their co-authored paper titled "SSN: A Spatial Semantic Network for High-accuracy, Stable and Generalized Intent Detection" in the 5th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Intelligence and Computing (DataCom) 2019 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in November 2019. DataCom is an international forum where engineers and scientists present their ideas and experiences in the field of Big Data intelligence and computing.
Dr Gerhard Hancke, Associate Professor in CS, received the J. David Irwin Early Career Award 2019 from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) for “research and educational contributions and impact on secure and reliable technology for the Industrial Internet-of-Things”. The award recognises the contributions that young researchers have made to advancing industrial electronics within the first 10 years of their professional experience.
Ding Chen, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, won the Best Student Paper Prize at the 2019 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC). The winning paper was supervised by Professor Luk Kwai-man and co-authored by Ms Jovi Mok Wing-chi, Scientific Officer, and Dr Chan Ka-fai, Engineer in the State Key Laboratory of Terahertz and Millimeter Waves. The title is “Phaseless Far-Field Gain Measurement of Circularly-Polarized Antennas”.
APMC is recognised as one of the premier international conferences for the microwave community.