Funding success
CityU has notched up a number of 1st positions in Hong Kong in this year’s 2020/2021 General Research Fund (GRF) and Early Career Scheme (ECS) funding exercise. These successes have been recorded in Electrical & Electronic Engineering; Mechanical, Production & Industrial Engineering; Mathematics; and Business. Consequently, CityU is now 3rd overall in Hong Kong in terms of the total number and total funding amount of GRF and ECS awards, while younger faculty members are placed overall 3rd in Hong Kong. A full rundown is available here.
New appointments
Professor Nikolaus Osterrieder has been appointed Chair Professor of Virology and One Health and concurrently Dean of Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences. Professor Osterrieder, who joined CityU on 3 July, was previously Professor of Virology and Chair at Freie Universität Berlin, and Adjunct Professor of Virology at Cornell University. He has served as the Director of the Berlin-wide Center for Infection Biology and Immunology (ZIBI) and the ZIBI Graduate School.
Professor Frank Chen Youhua of the Department of Management Sciences has been appointed Dean of College of Business from 1 July 2020. Professor Chen received his BS from Tsinghua University in Beijing and PhD from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining CityU in 2012, he was on faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore.
Professor Ching May-bo has been appointed Head of the Department of Chinese and History and Director of Chinese Civilisation Centre from 1 July 2020. Professor Ching, who obtained her D. Phil from the University of Oxford, has published extensively on a variety of subjects relating to the social and cultural history of modern China.
SCDS online seminar
In keeping with our pursuit of excellence in the area of Data Science, Dr Wong Ka-chun, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, will give an online talk titled “Disruptive AI Technologies for Molecular Biology and Medicine: DNA Motifs, CRISPR-Cas9 Off-Targets, and Cancer Screening from Blood” on 8 July. In the talk, Dr Wong will discuss his research group’s contributions to bioinformatics and health informatics with a special emphasis on unconventional and disruptive AI technologies. For enquires, call 3442 7887 or visit here for access to the seminar, which starts at 4pm. The event is co-organised by CityU’s Hong Kong Institute for Data Science and School of Data Science (SCDS), and the Association for Computing Machinery.
On 15 July, Dr Feng Long, Assistant Professor in SCDS, will discuss a framework concerning high-dimensional matrix recovery problems in his online talk titled “Projected Robust PCA with Application to Smooth Image Recovery”. He is a former post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics at Yale University and his main research interests include machine learning, image data analysis and high-dimensional statistics. His talk will begin at 3pm and can be accessed here.
JC Poetic Heritage Translation Awards 2020
The classical poem Hwaseokjeong Pavilion composed by the Korean Confucian scholar Yi I was chosen for translation for the JC Poetic Heritage Translation Awards, a major event for the CityU community held annually by the Department of Linguistics and Translation. The award ceremony was held on 30 June in a “hybrid” format with online participation by the chief adjudicator Professor Perng Ching-hsi from Taiwan and the honoured guest speaker Professor Cui Xiliang from Beijing. There were eight winners for the JC Poetic Heritage Translation Awards, and six for the accompanying Slogan Translation Competition.
Kudos
Professor Yang Tong of the Department of Mathematics, an expert in partial differential equations and kinetic theory, has been ranked 3rd in Asia by Asian Scientist magazine. The top 100 list celebrates the success of the region’s best and brightest scholars, highlighting their achievements across a range of scientific disciplines. Professor Yang is a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the State Natural Science Award (2nd class) of China and a Croucher Senior Research Fellow.
Chair Professor Chen Guanrong of the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) and alumnus Dr Lou Yang, a postdoctoral researcher in EE, have received the Chinese Institute of Electronics Best Paper Award 2020. The winning paper, co-authored with a scholar from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is titled “Enhancing Controllability Robustness of 𝑞-Snapback Networks through Redirecting Edges”. During his studies with EE, Dr Lou was supervised by Dr Kelvin Yuen Shiu-yin, Associate Professor in EE, and specialised in researching techniques for improving online and offline history-assisted evolutionary algorithms.