Achievements

Our BEng in EIE graduate, Lam Lai Ying, won the Third-Class Award in the Pan-Pearl River Delta Region IT Project Competition 2020

Our BEng in EIE graduate, Lam Lai Ying, won the Third-Class Award in the Pan-Pearl River Delta Region IT Project Competition 2020 with her final-year project on Mining of Public Transportation Data supervised by Dr Ivan Ho. The competition was organized by the Guangdong Province Federation of Computers with the Internet Professional Association (iProA) as the co-organizer for the Hong Kong Region. In the project, Lai Ying aimed to reduce traffic congestion and suggest alternative routes when MTR incidents happen during morning peak hours in Hong Kong via machine learning techniques. The proposed algorithm was validated against semi-realistic SUMO traffic simulation and empirical mobility traces provided by KMB.

Professor Francis Lau named 2021 IEEE Fellow

Professor Francis Lau has brought an honor to our Department as being elevated to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, effective from 1 January 2021, for contributions to analysis of chaotic communications systems and low-density parity-check code design. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation. Less than 0.1% of voting members are recommended annually by the IEEE Fellow Committee for this honor. To understand more about the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit https://www.ieee.org/membership/fellows/index.html.

Prof. Din-Ping Tsai and Prof. Gang Li have been named by Clarivate Analytics as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers.

Prof. Din-Ping Tsai and Prof. Gang Li have been named by Clarivate Analytics in its list of “2020 Highly Cited Researchers” as the most influential in the world. Their works have been highly cited by fellow academics and are hence making a significant impact in ongoing research in their respective fields of study. Highly Cited Researchers are selected for their exceptional research performance, determined by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science. A total of 6,167 researchers from over 60 countries and regions are named Highly Cited Researchers in 2020.

Our EE Research Achievements – New generation of Batteries & Energy Storage Systems

Lab-on-a-chip device for ultrasensitive detection of biomarkers

Quantitative detection of biomarkers has become increasingly important for the diagnosis of diseases. Because of its distinct merits of high sensitivity and high specificity, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) has been deemed the gold standard for biomarker analysis. However, the detection limit of current commercial ELISA products is on the level of several pg/mL, which cannot meet the requirement of many early-stage disease diagnosis applications. One of the promising solutions to improve ELISA is micro/nano-photonic technologies. In particular, high-quality whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microcavities with very low loss are one of the leading candidates because of their unique ability to build up very strong in-cavity light for investigation of light-matter interactions, and thus have great potential in biochemical sensing and lab-on-a-chip applications.   A research team led by Prof. Aping Zhang and Prof. Hwa-Yaw Tam developed an optofluidic biochip with high-quality polymer WGM microlaser sensors for ultrasensitive detection of biomarkers with ELISA. An in-house optical 3D µ-printing technology is used to rapidly fabricate low-threshold WGM microlasers. The fabricated WGM microlaser sensors were then integrated together with optical fibres upon a microfluidic chip and then modified in situ with biomolecules for highly selective biomarker detection. It is demonstrated that such an optofluidic biochip enables on-chip optofluidic ELISA of the disease biomarker vascular endothelial growth factor at the extremely low concentration level of 17.8 fg/mL, which is over 2 orders of magnitude better than the ability of current commercial ELISA kits.   The work is published in the journal Lab on a Chip (IF: 6.77) and featured on the Front Cover.

Mode-phase-difference Photothermal Spectroscopy

In 2019, Prof. Wei Jin’s group developed an advanced gas sensing technique - Mode-phase-difference Photothermal Spectroscopy (MPD-PTS), and achieved ppt (parts-per-trillion) detection limit with 8 orders of magnitude dynamic range. This is another 2 orders of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art! This impressive work in optical fiber gas sensor has been reported in the journal Nature Communications on 12 February 2020 [1]. The reviewer of the journal commented that MPD-PTS is a landmark technique in fiber-optic gas sensing.   Also, the MPD-PTS technique was selected by Optical Society of China (OSC) as 中國光學十大進展候選推薦 (2020): [1] Link of the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14707-0

We are glad to share that Prof. Gang Li has been appointed as Sir Sze-yuen Chung Endowed Professor in Renewable Energy under the Endowed Professorship Scheme of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Congratulations!

Congratulations to the Winners for the Faculty External Grants Achievement Awards 2018

Congratulations!! Two EE staff members became IEEE Fellows!

5 EIE students attained three prizes including the 1st Runner-up & Special Award for Technology in the Virtual Reality Contest 2018/19 organized by the Pao Yue-Kong Library!

5 EIE students attained three prizes including the 1st Runner-up & Special Award for Technology in the Virtual Reality Contest 2018/19 organized by the Pao Yue-Kong Library! The competition was supported by EIE with workshops in building VR applications conducted by Ms Doris Lin.