News & Stories

Mashiat Lamisa (third right) and her teammates Ilana Zimmerman (second right) and Dama Correch (third left) received the Empower Women Through Technology Prize at the cmd-f all-female* hackathon held at the University of British Columbia.

“Every tree is a living thing,” says Prof. WANG Yu-Hsing, Associate Head and Professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, while admiring a tree on the hillside near HKUST’s waterfront. Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018 cracked the tree almost in half. Severely damaged, Prof. Wang thought it might not make it, but it did miraculously. What fascinates him most is the tree’s resilience and tenacity in withstanding adverse weather conditions that have become more rampant due to climate change. In order to monitor the tree’s stability, Prof. Wang has installed a smart sensor at its lower trunk to monitor its’ tilting angle. The sensor mounted on the tree is developed by Prof. Wang and his research team who originally conducted a student-oriented project of using sensing technology on slopes seven years ago.

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.

Getting a divorce is hard, but going through paperwork and court proceedings can leave a deeper scar. A team of HKUST’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) students, supervised by professors and alumnus, has developed a “robo-lawyer” that not only saves time and money, but also paves the way for wider application of artificial intelligence technologies in the legal profession. Hong Kong’s divorce rate in 2016 was more than double that in 1991. The rising demand for family mediation has been a mounting challenge for Albert SO, a CSE alumnus from HKUST, who chairs the Hong Kong Mediation and Arbitration Centre. Few divorcing couples actually realized that the high legal costs and procedural drag would take an emotional toll on themselves, says Albert. Many of them are unwilling or unable to sit down for a mediation that could take months or years, especially for cross-border couples.

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.

A vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is more than protecting the lives of innocent animals, but also to enable a more sustainable way of living. This is why one of the working groups under Green Team held series of events to educate staff and students of HKUST about the benefits of living a plant-based lifestyle.

It?s been three years since the Sustainable Campus Leadership Program was launched that provides hands-on experience for students to design and implement their own Green Campus Projects in HKUST to address different sustainability issues.

In the "Psychology of Environmental Sustainability" course, students from a variety of backgrounds worked in groups to address real-world sustainability issues on campus.