News & Stories

Padmanabhan KRISHNAMURTHY (Paddy)’s sister worked with an NGO in India that helps people with visual impairment. He observed that people with any kind of impairments face immense difficulties, and wanted to do something to alleviate their problems. This inspired him and his teammate Amrutavarsh Sanganabasappa KINAGI (Amrut) to invent a lip-reader named “Helen”, which has just won the top prize in the 2019 HKUST President’s Cup that encourages undergraduate students to showcase creativity, innovation, and excellence.  Named after Helen KELLER, the renowned American author and educator who overcame the adversity of being blind and deaf to become one of the 20th century's leading humanitarians, the lip-reading device is expected to benefit millions of people when it’s well developed. According to the World Health Organization, there are 466 million people globally with some form of disabling hearing loss, and this number is forecasted to grow up to 900 million by 2050.

Have you ever struggled to catch a minibus to or from campus? It’s why a new “Finding Mini” app has been developed by HKUST alumni Jason Yuen, Simon Tsang, and current student Gash Tsui. “We deploy GPS module on each minibus, and sophisticated data algorithms developed by ourselves, with factors including weather, fluctuations of traffic, and real-time traffic conditions,” says Simon. While KMB buses already had an app for arrival times, the green minibuses did not. “We were very frustrated by this situation, because we could not compare arrival times between the double decker and minibus arrival times in Choi Hung, and the stops are on different ends of the street,” says Jason.

作者在座談會中，分享《夢想 X 熱情 -- 青年創業家的路》一書中科大十多位校友的創業故事。

Addressing societal issues has become a topic of common interest for the HKUST-Sino One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition  this year, with two of the three winning teams proposing solutions hoping to help save the planet. With Hong Kong striving to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, two winning student groups came up with plans to help reduce the city’s waste by upcycling bread scraps and making cutlery that can be savored together with the food. Meanwhile, another team created a real-time, non-invasive, and easily accessible technology to monitor athletes’ stress and muscle fatigue level to keep them from possible injuries induced by overtraining.  All three winning teams have been working with their industrial partners on commercializing the products.