Achievements

Second Runner-up in the Capture the Flag (CTF) Cybersecurity Competition

Supervised by Dr Haibo Hu and coached by Mr Kong Chun Ho (EIE MPhil student), a PolyU team comprised of Ma Kam Wa (BSc in INS student), Leung Hon Lam (BSc in INS student), Cheng Shiu Wang Ethan (BSc in IMT student) and Sham Wing Chung (COMP student), attained the Second Runner-up in the Capture the Flag (CTF) Cybersecurity Competition which was organized by the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in their HackaDay 2021 on 1 December 2021. The competition aims at increasing the general awareness of the importance of cybersecurity among the youths in Hong Kong and Macau. The HackaDay also serves as a platform for the future talents to raise their competency level for a meaningful career in cybersecurity. Around 80 students in 21 teams from Hong Kong and Macau joined this competition which tested their technical knowledge and analytical skills under five hacking challenges.

Grand Prize of the 7th Hong Kong University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

Led by Prof. Gang Li, a team of research staff and student including Liu Kuan, Ren Zhiwei and Zhang Heng Kai, won the Grand Prize (Innovation category) of the 7th Hong Kong University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition! The Competition was held by the Hong Kong New Generation Cultural Association which aims to promote science and innovation education in Hong Kong. The research team attained the First Prize for their project “High Performance Solution-Processed Perovskite Solar Cell Towards Sustainable Development” in the Innovation - Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering category of the Competition in May this year. The winning project was further selected by the judges as the only Grand Prize winner among the 39 awardees in the Innovation category. The team members received the Grand Prize from the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Government, Mrs Carrie Lam, in the Prize Presentation Ceremony on 27 November 2021.

Prof. Gang Li has been named 2022 Optica Fellow by Optica and 2021 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics.

We are pleased to share that Prof. Gang Li has been elected a Fellow of the Optica for 2022 for his seminal and sustained contributions to the research and development of organic solar cells and perovskite solar cells! This distinction was awarded by the Optica, formerly known as The Optical Society (OSA), to 106 members from 24 countries, for their significant contributions to the advancement of optics and photonics through education, research, engineering, business and service. It is a distinguished honor as the number of Fellows is limited to no more than 10% of the total Optica membership and the number elected each year is limited to approximately 0.5% of the current membership total.  Also, Prof. Gang Li has been named a Highly Cited Researcher by the Clarivate Analytics for 8 consecutive years since 2014. Prof. Li is acknowledged in the category of cross-field of the Highly Cited Researchers 2021 list recently. The Highly Cited Researchers are the most influential researchers who have published multiple papers frequently cited by their peers that rank in the top 1% of citations for field and year in the Web of Science.  Prof. Li’s research interests are organic semiconductor, and organo-metal halide hybrid perovskite based thin-film optoelectronic devices. He has published more than 160 journal papers including the paper on printed perovskite solar cell on Nature Photonics, and a Nature Communications paper on organic polymer solar cell this year. Congratulations to Prof. Li for his achievement!

1st Runner-Up of the IEEE VIP Cup 2021

Supervised by Prof. Kenneth Lam, four BEng in EIE students, including Chang Chun-tzu, Chi Ziheng, Li Xinyue and Wang Shaozhi, teamed up with other students from the University of Technology Sydney won the First Runner-Up of the Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup 2021 in the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing on 19 September 2021! The VIP Cup competition is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. It encourages students to solve real-world problems by using video and image processing methods and techniques. The theme of the VIP Cup is "SLP Human Pose Estimation" this year. Contestants were asked to seek computer vision-based solutions for in-bed pose estimation under the covers. Our winning team presented a multi-level adaptation framework to progressively learn a well-generalized network for cross-domain human pose estimation in this competition. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively generalize the learned knowledge from the uncovered source domain to the covered target domain for in-bed pose estimation.

Paul Baran Young Scholar Award 2021 by The Marconi Society.

We are pleased to share that Dr Shuowen Zhang has been selected as the sole winner for the Paul Baran Young Scholar Award 2021 by The Marconi Society for recognizing her work in intelligent reflecting surface-aided communications, MIMO, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. The Marconi Society was established in 1974 to commemorate the centennial of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, who was recognized as the father of wireless communication and won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy. The Paul Baran Young Scholar Award honors the world's most innovative young engineers in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).  Presented to researchers who are 27 years old or younger to commemorate Guglielmo Marconi's age when he made his first successful wireless transmission, this award recognizes brilliant young scientists and engineers who are leaders in the fields of advanced communications and information technology. Press Release by The Marconi Society: https://www.marconisociety.org/press/dr-shuowen-zhang-recognized-marconi-society-2021-young-scholar-award/ Award Presentation Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5krZerK-5C8

World’s first ammonia-powered fuel-cell EV– Achievements by Professor Eric Cheng

Prof. Eric Cheng Ka-wai and his research team developed the world’s first ammonia-powered fuel-cell EV in just three months. The ammonia inside the fuel-cell system will be transformed into hydrogen to generate power. This new development is through the support from the University of Oxford and industry partners. The research team plans to develop an ammonia-powered fuel-cell mini-bus by October 2022 and hopes to collaborate with local mini-bus companies to promote zero-emission electric mini-buses. For more details:https://www.facebook.com/151909049548/posts/10159475585939549/?d=n

Congratulations! Best Paper Award by IEEE IAS I&CPS Asia 2021

Professor Xu Zhao and his research team obtained the Best Paper Award, 2021 IEEE IAS Industrial and Commercial Power System Asia Conference (IEEE IAS I&CPS Asia 2021), Chengdu, China. The paper: Probabilistic Power Flow of Distribution System based on a Graph-Aware Deep Learning Network.

Highly sensitive, microscopic optical fibre sensors with pioneering biomedical monitoring capability

The research team led by Professor Hwa-yaw Tam, Chair Professor of Photonics and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at PolyU, developed the novel fibre optic microsensors that are biocompatible, supple and extremely sensitive to very small pressure changes inside the human body.  His team also made a critical breakthrough by basing their novel fibre optic sensors on an advanced plastic material, ZEONEX, that solves the problems of glass and traditional plastic. For more details, please click HERE.

2020 China’s Top Ten Optical Breakthroughs

Professor W Jin and his research team has worked on the “gas sensing research” which is honoured as “2020 China’s Top Ten Optical Breakthroughs” by China Laser Press.   In the applied research category, Professor Jin Wei, Chair Professor of Photonic Instrumentation, and his team developed a novel method of gas sensing called the Mode-phase-difference Photothermal Spectroscopy. The method was hailed as “a landmark technique in fibre-optic gas sensing” by a reviewer in Nature Communications, where the research results were published.  The innovation significantly outperforms state-of-the-art electrochemical and semiconductor gas sensors, and enables multi-component gas detection with a single sensing element. It paves the way for ultra-precision gas sensing for applications such as harmful gas detection in a space station and high voltage transformer condition monitoring.     

Second Runner-up in the Postgraduate Paper Contest

The IEEE Macau Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Chapter organized the Postgraduate Paper Contest 2020 for the Hong Kong and Macau postgraduate students to promote the advanced power and electronics technologies for smart city. Our PhD student, Liu Ying, won the Second Runner-up in this contest with the research paper “A Study on the Safety of Inductive Power Transfer System for Kitchen Appliances”. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the safety of human body in the electromagnetic field generated by the inductive power transfer (IPT) system, which is designed for kitchen appliances. Comparisons of the basic and reference limit values of various safety standards are investigated through theoretical circuit analysis and extensive simulation studies. Simulation models of human body together with an IPT system for kitchen appliances are established to reveal the effect of electromagnetic field on the human body. Corresponding experiments are carried out through establishing a prototype of designed IPT system and simulating the human standing position. The measured results are consistent with the theoretical results.