Prof. Jianlei Niu of the Department of Building Services Engineering (BSE) has been awarded $34.6 million by the RGC Theme-based Research Scheme for a project entitled “Healthy and Resilient City with Pervasive LoCHs.” The project aims to create localized outdoor comfort places/hubs (LoCHs) in the urban environment by employing a scientific microclimate design methodology based on advanced modelling and simulation of wind, heat, and moisture in the early stages of building design and planning, with the help of artificial intelligence in optimisation. As the project coordinator, Prof. Niu will lead a team of 13 researchers from various disciplines of PolyU and other local universities, including his BSE colleagues Prof. Cheuk-ming Mak and Dr Ruoyu You, Dr Zheng Tan of the Department of Building and Real Estate (BRE), Prof. John Shi of the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI), and Dr Ting-kei Pong of the Department of Applied Mathematics. The research team also includes 10 researchers from 8 overseas universities, and 2 collaborators respectively from the estate developer and software developer. Prof. Niu looks forward to working with other stakeholders from the relevant government departments and estate development industry to speed up the application of the research results.

This is the fourth project in FCE to be supported by the prestigious scheme. The previously awarded projects were respectively led by Prof. Tao Wang and Prof. Jin-Guang Teng of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) as well as Prof. Asif Usmani, Head of BSE.

Urban wind and microclimate modeling

Simulation based optimization

The 2021/22 application results for the RGC General Research Fund (GRF) and Early Career Scheme (ECS) were announced on 30 June 2021. Due to their similar nature, the application results for these 2 schemes have been combined in some of the following analysis:

In terms of the number of grants per year, CEE led with 20 awarded grants, followed by BSE and LSGI respectively. As seen from Figure 1, the number of grants has shown a significant increase in the present round, while the total funding has exceeded $32 million (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Comparison of Number of Grants per Year between Departments over past 10 Years

Figure 2: Comparison of Total Grants Awarded per Year between Departments over past 10 Years

In the Civil Engineering, Surveying, Building and Construction (CESBC) disciplines of the Engineering Panel, PolyU has led local universities in the GRF/ECS exercises since 1994/95 in both the number of GRF/ECS projects supported and the total grant value awarded, consistently winning around or over 40% of all GRF/ECS grants allocated in these disciplines. The distribution of the amount of GRF/ECS funding in 2021/22 among local universities is shown in Figure 3. We received 55% of the total available funding in the CESBC disciplines this year, which is the largest percentage we ever achieved, with an average funding of HK$896K per project.

Figure 3: Distribution of GRF/ECS Funding in the CESBC Disciplines among Institutions in the 2021/22 Round

Of the 36 GRF/ECS grants awarded to the Faculty this year, 3 were awarded outside the CESBC disciplines. The Faculty won 33 grants (or 45.2%) totaling HK$29,839K out of 73 GRF/ECS grants awarded by RGC in the CESBC disciplines in the present round (i.e. 2021/22).

On 23 and 24 June 2021, a delegation of leading aerospace scientists in charge of China’s lunar and Mars explorations gave some lectures at PolyU and took the opportunity to visit the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI). Mr Zezhou Sun, chief designer of the Mars probe Tianwen-1, and Ms He Zhang, executive director of the Chang’e-4 lunar probe project, were welcomed by Prof. Bo Wu, Associate Head (Research) of LSGI, who took them on a tour of the Planetary Remote Sensing Lab. They were shown some of the technologies that supported the successful landings of Tianwen-1 and Chang’e-4/5, including photogrammetry, laser altimetry, and photoclinometry. Prof. Wu and his team contributed to Tianwen 1 by identifying the potential landing sites of the probe. They analyzed an area as large as the size of 11 Hong Kong within 6 weeks to select the final landing site.

In addition, Ms Zhang and Mr Jun Xie, chief designer of the third generation Beidou navigation satellite system, also visited the Navigation Lab in the company of PolyU President Prof. Jin-guang Teng and Prof. Wu Chen, Head of LSGI. The guests learnt about LSGI’s latest collaborations involving Beidou, a focus of China’s space programmes that welcome the participation of young talents to drive the development of the country into a space power.

Prof. Bo Wu (middle) with Ms He Zhang (left) and Mr Zezhou Sun (right)

Prof. Wu Chen, Ms He Zhang, Mr Jun Xie, and PolyU President Prof. Jin-guang Teng at the Navigation Lab (left to right)

The Endowed Professorship Scheme of PolyU was established in 2012 to honour distinguished scholars for their outstanding academic and research achievements. Ir Prof. Chi Sun Poon was recently appointed as Michael Anson Professor in Civil Engineering under this scheme. He is also Head of the Department of Civil and Environment Engineering (CEE) and Chair Professor of Sustainable Construction Materials. Supported by a donation from Able Engineering Co. Ltd., which has been a strong supporter of the Endowed Professorship Scheme, this endowed professorship was named after the founding dean of the predecessor of the Faculty of Construction and Environment, Prof. Michael Anson, to honour him for his enormous contributions to the Faculty since he became the Head of the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering in 1988. Guiding the Faculty’s research development in its early days, Prof. Anson continued to be an inspiration even after his retirement in 2003 as an Emeritus Professor. A fitting tribute to his pioneering spirit, the creation of an endowed professorship in his name adds one more to FCE, bringing the total of such professorships in FCE to six.

To support early-career academics and nurture the nascent development of innovative ideas with huge untapped potential, the University has launched the Endowed Young Scholars Scheme. Dr Chao Zhou of CEE was appointed as Tsui Tack Kong Young Scholar in Civil Engineering. An outstanding alumnus of PolyU, Ir Tsui has been a staunch supporter of his alma mater for many years. He has contributed to numerous past initiatives of the university, and wishes to further the advancement of FCE as a leading entity for world-class research and education with his donation to the Endowed Young Scholars Scheme.

The Schemes provide philanthropists with the unique opportunity to partner with the University to advance research and academic activities in a discipline of their choice for the benefits of the wider community.

Prof. Yiqing Ni, Director of the Hong Kong Branch of the Chinese National Rail Transit Electrification and Automation Engineering Technology Research Centre (CNERC-Rail) at PolyU and Chair Professor of Smart Structures and Rail Transit in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), shared in a recent interview with Hong Kong Commercial Daily that the safety of China’s high speed rails has improved with the advanced technologies developed by CNERC. Big data will be harnessed by his team in the future to monitor the operation of the rails. With the ongoing RGC-supported research on smart sensing at PolyU, Prof. Ni expects sensors will inevitably be integrated into the design of trains to produce smart rails. His research has also benefited the monitoring systems of Tsing Ma Bridge and Stonecutters Bridge to make them safer. Over the last five years, he has organized many inter-disciplinary and engineering research projects at PolyU. His efforts to enhance the structural health monitoring of major infrastructures have been rewarded with numerous awards, including a second-class State Scientific and Technological Progress Award 2016, as well as a Science and Technology Award from the Chinese Society for Vibration Engineering.

Paving roads with mixture of asphalt and waste tyres

Dr Zhen Leng of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) has found a way to reduce traffic noise by paving roads with a mixture of asphalt and waste tyres. His research discovered that noise levels caused by vehicle tyres on roads could be reduced more than three decibels when 20% of waste tyre rubber was added into the asphalt binder. If all the roads currently surfaced with asphalt in the city were replaced with the rubberized mixture, he believes a significant amount of waste tyres would be recycled, thus addressing various environmental problems associated with waste tyre disposal.

Dr Leng began working with the Hong Kong government on this in 2016, with on-site testing scheduled for various local roads this year. His research team also successfully developed an approach to convert waste plastics into durability-enhancing additives for asphalt mixture. Recently, Dr Leng signed an agreement with Henan’s Department of Transportation to apply and test this waste plastic derived additive on a 1-2km expressway section in Henan Province.

Academic performance may be affected by one’s seating location

Conducted at several local universities in 2019, research on university students’ seating location and their academic performance has revealed a significant relationship. Tracking nearly two hundred students using a mobile app to measure their attendance, seating location and performance in tests, the study found that the soft-field students in disciplines like arts and philosophy who sat nearer to the lecturer got higher scores than those who sat farther away, while the performance of hard-field students in disciplines like engineering and surveying was not affected by seating location. It was evident that seating location is one of the indicators of student engagement in some disciplines. These were some findings of a UGC-supported teaching and learning project led by Prof. Charles Wong, Associate Dean (Teaching) of the Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE), who was recently interviewed by the Times Higher Education.

In addition to customizing seating arrangements and physical learning spaces for different disciplines to enhance teaching and learning, Prof. Wong suggests teachers can use technologies i.e. AR/VR/MR and move around the classroom to interact more with students, whose engagement and learning outcomes could also be improved.

The Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI) welcomed Prof. Qihao Weng to the post of Chair Professor of Geomatics and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI) in July 2021.

Prof. Weng obtained his MSc and MA degrees in Geography from the South China Normal University in 1990 and from the University of Arizona in 1995 respectively, and his PhD degree in Geography from the University of Georgia in 1999. Before joining PolyU, Prof. Weng was the Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Change (2014-2021) and Professor of Geography (2009-2021) at the Indiana State University. His research interests include remote sensing applications to urban environmental and ecological systems, land-use and land-cover changes, urbanization impacts, urban sustainability, environmental modeling and human-environment interactions. He has authored 259 articles and 14 books with h-index of 70. His research has been supported by funding agencies including the NSF, NASA, National Geographic Society, and Microsoft. He is currently the lead of the GEO Global Urban Observation and Information Initiative and an editor-in-chief of the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

The Department of Building and Real Estate (BRE) welcomed 2 new assistant professors recently. Dr Yuting Hou received her BEng in Land Information Technology/Land Management from Wuhan University and MSc in Human Geography from Peking University. She holds a PhD in Policy, Planning and Development from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where she was awarded the John Dyckman Award for Best Dissertation in Planning. Before joining PolyU, Yuting was a research fellow in the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

Dr Yiwei Weng received his dual Bachelor’s Degrees (2014) in Material Science Engineering (Major) and Financial Engineering (minor) from the University of Science and Technology Beijing, Master’s Degree (2015) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from NTU in 2020. Before joining PolyU, he was a research fellow at the NTU (2020-2021). His research focuses on digital construction, specializing in developing sustainable printable material, integrating Building Information Modeling, and designing novel printing systems.