News & Stories

The global race for fifth generation supremacy is under way, with countries competing to be the first to provide 5G mobile broadband services. The ultra-fast network will prompt inventions, of which today we cannot even dream. Countries around the world have devoted much resources to developing, manufacturing and deploying the new equipment necessary for 5G transmissions. China, for instance, has recently become highly influential in the field with its ability to develop infrastructure for 5G systems worldwide. In Asia, Hong Kong has been blamed for being slow to launch the new service in comparison with the mainland, South Korea and Japan. Actually, a delay is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows Hong Kong to have a longer testing period to ensure a more reliable and decent 5G mobile service. Hong Kong's privately-owned telecom market is very competitive and cautious.

The HKUST Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Team was crowned the All-Around Champion and Engineering Presentation Champion in the MATE International ROV Competition 2019, which was held on June 20-22 in Kingsport, Tennessee, US. This marks the second time that the team receives all-around championship in this international competition since they first participated in 2011, after the first time in 2017. They are also the only Asian team so far that gained this top accolade in the 18-year history of this competition.

Humans are creatures who often judge whether a dish is attractive or a stranger is friendly simply by their own eyes. But our sense of smell is just as important. We all may have the experience of eating with a stuffy nose and found a dish to be tasteless or using our nose to check whether it has gone bad. Moreover, people tend to keep their distance from a person with an unpleasant odor, while special odors like gas can alert us to dangers of a leak. As the old Chinese adage goes, "My shack is better than an emperor's bed." What makes our own shack better? Our smell, together with the smell of our family members, and pets as well if any, makes it unique and reassuring. To understand how smell impacts people, researchers at the University of British Columbia, Canada, invited 96 couples for a study last year.

Our fishery gave birth to a love of seafood, but it is also contributing to the global fish stocks decline. We degraded it through overfishing, pollution and reclamation before building a fleet to ravage fisheries in other places. Many cities have actually done the same. Ironically, calls to save global fish stocks come from cities that sacrificed their own fisheries. Yet, Hong Kong also shows the way to a solution. It retains a resilient population of people who fish, those with the expertise and toughness to build a sustainable fishery, that is, such as those where catch volume and fishing practices allow for continual regeneration of stock, while enabling fishers to achieve a decent standard of living. People in the industry will overfish and abuse the ecosystem to provide more income if they can't afford a living. But our highly adaptable fishermen can demonstrate a global model for sustainable fishery.

The HKUST Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Team defended their champion title in the 14th Hong Kong Regional of the MATE International ROV Competition. The ROV Team, a sub-team of the HKUST Robotics Team, has been named champion in this competition for the ninth consecutive year. They will represent Hong Kong to take part in the MATE International ROV Competition 2019 in Kingsport, Tennessee, US on June 20-22.

HKUST Institute for the Environment today launched a new mobile app that aims to help users reduce their exposure to outdoor air pollution. PRAISE-HK stands for “Personalized Real-time Air-quality Informatics System for Exposure – Hong Kong” and will help build Hong Kong into a world-class smart and healthy city. Funded by HSBC 150th Anniversary Charity Program, PRAISE-HK is a five-year project commenced in November 2016, and covers three major release milestones for the mobile app and the system:

Unmanned aircraft systems started to gain attention in US military operations more than a decade ago, but nowadays, people enjoy flying drones for photography and videography purposes. Drones are also gaining widespread acceptance for goods delivery, surveying and scientific research. I have two recreational drones, so I was eager to examine the three-month drone regulation proposals put out by the Civil Aviation Department in late 2017. There are six recommendations for the UAS regulatory regime: a registration system; risk-based classification of operations; training and assessment requirements; drone maps; insurance requirements; and indoor operations. The recommendations are sound, but a number of salient issues were omitted. The first is the absence of regulations governing drone manufacturers.

It is common to hear non-arts undergraduate students complain about being forced to take humanities classes that have nothing to do with their area of study or career aspirations. But Dr. Daisy DU Yan, Associate Professor from Division of Humanities, thinks otherwise. Scientists and engineers should study arts and humanities to better understand what their inventions mean to society and humanity.  It is Dr. Du’s mission to involve more and more students in her classes and help them become critical and creative thinkers with a sense of empathy. “Humanities has soft power. Sometimes it can have an even bigger influence on people than scientific inventions,” she adds, bringing examples from history, from Shakespeare to LU Xun, an impactful Chinese writer who started out studying medicine, but later became a writer as he believed in the greater power of words than medicine on people.