Achievements

Prof. Gang Li awarded RGC Senior Research Fellow 2022/23

The University has been awarded three of the ten grants under the Research Grants Council's (RGC) Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS) 2022/23. The SRFS aims to provide sustained support to exceptionally outstanding researchers at UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong to facilitate their dedication to research and development. Prof. Gang Li is one of the PolyU outstanding scholars who is conferred the title of RGC Senior Research Fellow and will receive HKD 7.7 million SRFS funding for his research project “Printable Organic Solar Cells: Materials and Device Investigations towards Applications”. Organic solar cell (OSC) is an emerging photovoltaic (PV) technology with distinct advantages in many areas, such as flexible/portable PV, building integrated PV and transparent power applications. Aiming at accelerating the OSC technology, Prof. Li proposed a systematic plan to tackle the challenges in OSC. The project will significantly push forward OSC technology in terms of high efficiency, stability, compatibility with unique applications and being printing friendly. The proposed research represents a new frontier for OSC technology, which integrates chemistry, physics and material science to generate new perspectives in science and come up with solutions to challenging issues in renewable energy.

Dr Pauli Lai and Dr Haibo Hu won the Faculty Awards for Outstanding Achievement 2022

We are pleased to share that Dr Pauli Lai and Dr Haibo Hu won the 2022 Faculty Individual Merit Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching, and Research and Scholarly Activities (Outstanding Researcher) respectively! The winners are chosen by the Faculty Assessment Panel, comprising Heads and chaired by the Dean of Faculty Engineering, from amongst a pool of well-qualified nominees put forward by individual departments. The selection is made with reference to the indicative criteria for assessment as laid down by the University to recognize the awardees for their outstanding performances in the related areas. Congratulations to Dr Lai and Dr Hu for their achievements!

1st Runner Up in Cybersecurity Purple Team Competition 2022

Led by Dr Haibo Hu, our Capture The Flag (CTF) team won the 1st Runner Up in the Cybersecurity Purple Team Competition 2022! The competition was organized by the Cybersecurity Centre of the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education. It aims to arouse the interest of the public in cybersecurity and nurture talents for the industry. The team members, including Cheng Shiu Wang Ethan (BSc in IMT student), Leung Hon Lam (BSc in INS student), Ng Cheuk Wing (BSc in INS student) and Sham Wing Chung (COMP student), participated in the trainings provided by the Cybersecurity Centre in May, and the competitions on 14 and 28 May 2022 to compete with other contestants from different institutions on the challenges which were integrated with the red, blue and purple teams’ security elements.

Winning in Global Social Innovation Summit 2022

Our BEng in EIE student, Rizalino Antonio LABOS, won the Champion in the Accenture Case in the Global Social Innovation Summit 2022 between 18 and 19 June 2022 together with three teammates from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Summit was organized by the Enactus Hong Kong to inspire university students to explore issues related to the green economy and promote the concepts of social innovation. The contestants were required to solve real-life cases from international corporations and social businesses. The winning team proposed to develop a VR experience and reward tracking app that could encourage the Accenture employees to adopt a sustainable lifestyle.  

EIE student swept three prizes in the Learning to Learn (L2L) Video Contest

Our BSc in Internet and Multimedia Technologies programme student, Lee Ka Yin, swept three prizes including the Best Video Award (Silver), the Best Interpretation Award and the Best Message Delivery Award, for his video entitled “Wasted 4 years in filmmaking, here’s what I learnt”  on sharing his film production learning experience in the Learning to Learn (L2L) Video Contest! The Contest was organized by the Educational Development Centre and the Communities of Practice of PolyU from March to May 2022. It invited students and teachers to create short videos to share their insights and discoveries with a view to helping others to become better learners.

2022 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award

Dr Shuowen Zhang attained the 2022 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award for her paper “Cellular-Enabled UAV Communication: A Connectivity-Constrained Trajectory Optimization Perspective” published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in March 2019! This award honors the authors of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the IEEE Communications Society Society’s technical scope and who, upon the date of submission of the paper, is less than 30 years of age. Integrating the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the cellular network is envisioned to be a promising technology to significantly enhance the communication performance of both UAVs and existing terrestrial users. In this paper, Dr Zhang’s research team first provide an overview on the two main research paradigms in cellular UAV communications, namely, cellular-enabled UAV communication with UAVs as new aerial users served by the ground base stations (GBSs), and UAV-assisted cellular communication with UAVs as new aerial communication platforms serving the terrestrial users. Then, they focus on the former paradigm and study a new UAV trajectory design problem subject to practical communication connectivity constraints with the GBSs. They aim to minimize the UAV's mission completion time by optimizing its trajectory, subject to a quality-of-connectivity constraint of the GBS-UAV link specified by a minimum receive signal-to-noise ratio target, which needs to be satisfied throughout its mission. To tackle this challenging non-convex optimization problem, they first propose an efficient method to verify its feasibility via checking the connectivity between two given vertices on an equivalent graph. Next, by examining the GBS-UAV association sequence over time, they obtain useful structural results on the optimal UAV trajectory, based on which two efficient methods are proposed to find high-quality approximate trajectory solutions by leveraging the techniques from graph theory and convex optimization. The proposed methods are analytically shown to be capable of achieving a flexible tradeoff between complexity and performance, and yielding a solution in polynomial time with the performance arbitrarily close to that of the optimal solution.

Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Department of Electrical Engineering 2022

The Department of Electrical Engineering is pleased to announce that two distinguished graduates are awarded the “Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Department of Electrical Engineering 2022” in recognition of their professional/entrepreneurial achievements and significant contributions to the Department. Their remarkable achievements and valuable contributions have earned them well-deserved honour and respectful recognition. Congratulations to the following awardees!  

Four EIE staff won various Faculty awards

We are pleased to share that Dr Haibo Hu, Prof. Chao Lu and Prof. Changyuan Yu won the Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award for 2020, and Prof. Gang Li also attained the Faculty Merit Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities 2021 recently!

Congratulations to the Winners for the President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Knowledge Transfer 2021

The President’s Executive Committee has endorsed the setting up of the President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Knowledge Transfer (KT) to recognise and reward staff members’ KT endeavours which are underpinned by research and innovation and have created significant impact on industry and society.  Any successful cases should provide evidence of how PolyU’s research and innovation has created significant impact to industry and/or society during the period of the past 7 years (From January 2014 to 2021), through collaborative/contract research, licensing of a patent, entrepreneurship, consultancy, or other appropriate means. The “President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement in KT: Industry” recognises KT impact cases which can demonstrate contributions in advancing the technological or industry standards, addressing the needs of the industry, or enhancing its competitiveness through application of PolyU’s research and innovations in the form of products, methodologies, systems and/or solutions.  Professor HY TAM (Team Leader) leads his research team on an impact story: “World’s First Predictive Maintenance Railway Monitoring System” is one of the 5 teams awarded in this category.  His team members include Ir Dr Lee Kang Kuen, Dr SY Liu, Dr Stephen Cho and Mr. David Au. Our greatest congratulations to them!  

Congratulations to the Winners for the Faculty Research Grants Achievement Awards 2020

Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award has been set up by the Faculty Research Committee since 2003, with a view to recognize the outstanding performance of FENG academic staff members in securing external competitive research grants.  This year, both Professors Wei Jin and Aping Zhang, and Drs KH Lam and SX Niu are the winners of this award.