News & Stories

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. 

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Xunlei Limited (Xunlei or the Company) today announced the establishment of HKUST-Xunlei Joint Laboratory on Blockchain Technology (the Joint Lab). The Joint Lab aims to develop cutting-edge and influential blockchain technologies that are applicable to various industries and establish a high-performance blockchain ecosystem in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. A signing ceremony was held on HKUST campus, marking the official launch of the Joint Lab and research collaboration. Prof. Tim CHENG, Dean of Engineering of HKUST, and Ms. LAI Xin, the Chief Engineer of ThunderChain at Xunlei, signed the collaborative agreement as witnessed by Prof. Nancy IP, Vice-President for Research and Development of HKUST, and Mr. CHEN Lei, Chief Executive Officer of Xunlei and Onething Technologies.

IAS Bank of East Asia Professor Ching Tang is awarded 2019 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology

By Miao Jia, Research Assistant Professor of Division of Social Science, HKUST By 2064, Hong Kong's number of elderly (aged 65 and older) will reach 2.58 million, accounting for 36 percent of the population. Today this percentage stands at 16, with one third of the elderly living in poverty. These staggering figures pose severe challenges to our society, thus studying the well-being of Hong Kong's elderly is vital to developing the right solutions. Since 2010, our Center for Applied Social and Economic Research team at HKUST has been conducting surveys of 3,200 families, 7,200 adults and 950 children every two years (The Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics), looking into how our society is transformed over time and how various government and social policies are influencing families.