School of Data Science (SDSC) and Hong Kong Institute for Data Science (HKIDS) celebrated their second anniversary by holding the CityU’s Data Science Day 2020 on 7 August, attracting over 180 participants. The event started with the opening remarks by Prof Way KUO, President and University Distinguished Professor of City University of Hong Kong. Dr Kai-Fu LEE, world-renowned artificial intelligence (AI) scholar and entrepreneur, delivered a keynote speech on the frontier development and future exploration direction of AI. The Day featured two technical sessions to showcase HKIDS project presentations by faculty members across CityU. At the same time, a panel discussion on interdisciplinary research and education of data science was held, providing a unique perspective for the various applications of data science which made another highlight of the Day.

President Way KUO delivered an opening remarks for the event, gathered together with Prof Alex JEN, Provost, and Prof Jian LU, Vice-President (Research and Technology). President Kuo noted the importance of the establishment of SDSC two years ago, anticipating the demand of data science professionals was on the rise.

“In the context of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, in order to perform data mining more efficiently, it is truly necessary to open up data science as a new academic discipline. The data sets we study have expanded from pure numbers in the past to complex forms such as texts, images and sounds. For this reason, frontier topics such as natural language processing and computer vision are also the main research directions of SDSC in the future.” He continued, “HKIDS is committed to providing new analytical tools for different disciplines and conducting interdisciplinary exploration based on data science.”

Prof S. Joe QIN, Dean of SDSC and Director of HKIDS shared the achievement and development of SDSC and HKIDS.

“At present, SDSC has graduated its first class of students as Master of Science in Data Science and a number of PhD students in Data Science respectively. Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Bachelor of Engineering in Data and Systems Engineering programmes will receive a new class of freshmen in addition to the sophomore class that was enrolled last year. The well-designed interdisciplinary curricula have further provided students with essential trainings in an ever-globalising workplace. Since its establishment, SDSC has been well-positioned to respond to the needs in this substantive trend. It provides students with extensive exposure across multiple industries and many well-known enterprises, such as Ant Group (formerly known as Ant Financial), JD Digits and Tencent. In the future, both SDSC and HKIDS will continue to devote effort to nurturing talents in data analytics and AI for Hong Kong and the world.”

In his keynote speech of “The Tech Superpowers & Next in AI,” Dr Kai-Fu LEE highlighted the unique advantages of China’s AI market, the latest progress in other cutting-edge technology fields, and the next stage of AI development. Dr Lee first analyzed how the two countries formed the status of today’s technological superpower by comparing the technological development history between the United States and China.

“The development of AI in China in the past decade can be regarded as a miracle. China’s AI development benefitted from a few unique advantages: first, huge user base and data. Data is oil in the new era. China has created a huge database with the largest number of users in the world. Taking the world’s leading intelligent healthcare as an example, AI has made it possible to realize information sharing and virus tracking, which helps China better cope with COVID-19; second, techno-utilitarianism policy, in which China takes the government centric driving mode as the leading mode, can achieve the maximum data utilization rate; third, diligent enterprises.” Dr Lee continued, “in addition to the rapid development of the industry, China is also heading up in the frontier research field of AI in deep learning, and the proportion of papers at the top meetings in 2019 has reached the region second only to the United States.” During the keynote speech, Dr Lee introduced the application of data science such as virtual currency, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and quantum computing. As for the next stage of AI development, Dr Lee stressed that AI research gradually moves from perception-driven “system I” to recognition-driven “system II.” He also introduced the frontier research in NLP, CV and reinforcement learning. “Of course, there are still many limitations and challenges in the application of AI, such as the tedious manual annotation of data in supervised learning, the expensive requirements for computing power, and the security and robustness problems that may arise in practical application, but we have reasons to believe that the AI development is full of possibilities.”

Followed by the panel discussion session, Prof Qin and other Deans of CityU’s Colleges and Schools shared their insights in the data science for interdisciplinary research and education. The panelists comprised of Prof Richard ALLEN, Dean of School of Creative Media; Prof Chak Keung CHAN, Dean of School of Energy and Environment; Prof Raymond Hon-Fu CHAN, Dean of College of Science; Prof Tei Wei KUO, Dean of College of Engineering; Prof Nikolaus OSTERRIEDER, Dean of Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences; and Prof Richard WALKER, Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The panel discussion addressed the two major issues: to enrich general education for students of various colleges and schools for data literacy and to introduce the application of data science and machine learning in their fields. The panelists shared how their students and research project teams had greatly benefitted from learning data science and machine learning so as to deal with complex data and systems effectively.

Prof Ding-Xuan ZHOU, Associate Dean and Chair Professor of SDSC, and Prof Minghua CHEN, Professor of SDSC and Assistant Director of HKIDS chaired the Day’s programme with speakers from six HKIDS project teams who brought exciting data analysis research in their respective fields. Respective speakers and session highlights include;

• Prof Hong YAN, Chair Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering, and Prof Min XIE, Chair Professor of Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management and School of Data Science, presented the big-data-driven performance analysis, prediction and control of smart factories, aiming to study the application of intelligent factory.

• Prof Richard WALKER, Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences; Chan Hon Pun Professor of Behavioural and Policy Sciences and Chair Professor of Department of Public Policy, Dr Edmund CHENG, Associate Professor of Department of Public Policy and Dr Chris Fei SHEN, Associate Professor of Department of Media and Communication, conducted big data analysis of Hong Kong protest with blending topic modeling and social network analysis.

• Dr Yanni SUN, Associate Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering and Dr Patrick LEE, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of School of Energy and Environment, used modern sequencing technology to sequence all genetic material in different samples, and studied dark matter in microbial communities from a large number of genomic data.

• Prof Meichun LIU, Head and Professor of Department of Linguistics and Translation and Dr John LEE, Associate Professor of Department of Linguistics and Translation, presented a level-annotated corpus of Chinese textbook materials, and report preliminary results of a readability assessment system that takes not only lexical, but also syntactic and semantic complexity into account.

• Dr Ka-Chun WONG, Assistant Professor of Department of Computer Science, introduced the data analysis method his project team are studying to detect early cancer from blood, which can double the existing sensitivity from 38% to 77% for the earliest cancer detection (i.e., Stage I) at the 99% specificity level.

• Prof Jonathan ZHU, Chair Professor of Department of Media and Communication and School of Data Science, shared the application of ego-network analysis to explore the continuous reconstruction of the global political and economic ecosystem based on the transnational flow of goods, capital and information.

Concluded a day full of knowledge sharing and inspiring talks, SDSC and HKIDS extended their warm gratitude to the joint efforts of all the participating leaders, experts, guests and representatives.