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PolyU’s Civil Engineering Ranked Second Globally by US News

In the 2022 Best Global Universities Rankings by US News, PolyU is the fourth best university in Hong Kong and 15th in Asia. Globally, it has jumped from 170th last year to 124th among the top institutions around the world. Its Civil Engineering subject, which is a major offering of the Faculty of Construction of Environment (FCE), is now ranked number two in the world, one spot ahead of last year’s ranking. The US News ranks universities based on 13 indicators that measured their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations.

Smart Tree Management System Transferred to HK Government

The Jockey Club Smart City Tree Management Project finally came to an end after three successful years of implementation, which resulted in a smart monitoring system of about 8,000 trees all over Hong Kong. In a recent closing ceremony, the system’s technology was officially transferred to the Tree Management Office of the HKSAR Government’s Development Bureau. Developed by Prof. Charles Wong and his research team at the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI), the system involves a Smart Sensing Technology and Geographic Information Systems based platform to monitor changes in the environment and other relevant tree data. The leaning trends of trees installed with smart sensors were predicted by big data analysis, triggering safety inspections of trees whose tilting angles exceeded certain thresholds. Risks to passersby and surrounding properties can thus be averted. Speaking at the ceremony, PolyU’s Executive Vice President, Dr Miranda Lou, thanked The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust for their generous support in enabling PolyU to contribute to sustainable development and tree conservation through innovative research. The Under Secretary for Development, Mr Chun-san Liu, JP thanked the project team and expressed that the continued use of the system by the government can benefit the community in facilitating urban forestry management.

Theme-based Research Scheme 2021/22 to Support Creation of Local Outdoor Comfort Hubs

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.

Donations to Support Pursuit of Excellence in FCE

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, Head of the Department of Civil and Environment Engineering (CEE) and Chair Professor of Sustainable Construction Materials, was recently appointed as Michael Anson Professor in Civil Engineering under this scheme. Supported by a donation from Able Engineering Co. Ltd., the endowed professorship was named after a 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.

FCE Shines in Research Assessment Exercise 2020

The long-awaited results of the Research Assessment Exercise 2020 are out! The Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE) is pleased that its submissions to the panel of Built Environment have been favorably assessed by the University Grants Committee (UGC) according to their research outputs, impact, and environment. The FCE submissions were assessed under two Units of Assessment (UoA) , namely (i) civil engineering (including construction engineering and management) and building technology, as well as (ii) planning and surveying (land and other). Overall, 73% of the research by FCE’s 91 eligible staff were deemed “world-leading” (4*) or “internationally excellent” (3*), compared to the sector-wide average of 71%. Among the UGC-funded universities in this field, PolyU is within the top three. In particular, 93% of our research environment and 83% of our research impact were rated “world-leading” (4*) or “internationally excellent” (3*), higher than the respective sector-wide averages of 70% and 74%. With respect to the two UoAs, FCE achieved 75% of 4* and 3* ratings in research outputs in the UoA of planning and surveying (land and other). Its research impact and environment with these ratings in the same UoA were 50% and 85% respectively. In the UoA of civil engineering and building technology, the research outputs of FCE rated 4* and 3* were 65%, while 100% of its research impact and environment achieved these high ratings.

China’s First Landing on Mars Supported by Research of LSGI Academic

The landing of Chinese spacecraft Tianwen-1 on Mars in mid-May 2021 has made aerospace history. It was the first time in the world that a spacecraft has completed orbiting, landing and roving in one single mission. Two PolyU research teams had supported the successful mission. One was led by Prof. Bo Wu of the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-informatics (LSGI). From 2017 to 2020, his team had shortlisted three potential landing regions on Mars, one of which was the southern Utopia Planitia, the largest recognised impact basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. It was eventually chosen as the target landing region after detailed topographic and geomorphological mapping and analysis. Using the high-resolution images sent from Tianwen-1 of the target landing region covering an area of about 11 times larger than the size of Hong Kong’s territory, Prof. Wu and his team generated high-resolution and high-precision 3D digital topographic models of the target landing region using the integrated 3D mapping model developed by them to analyse the detailed topography and identify large slopes hazardous for landing. They also developed AI-based techniques for more automated and robust analysis of geomorphological features like craters and rocks from the high-resolution images in a short period of time. More than 670,000 craters, over two million rocks, and hundreds of volcanic cones distributed over the target landing region were analyzed in 1.5 months, achieving much higher efficiency in the automatic extraction of rocks and craters with an accuracy of about 85%. The spacecraft for the Tianwen-1 probe comprises an orbiter, a lander and the Zhurong rover. In collaboration with the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the latest mission aims to obtain scientific exploration data on the Red Planet. With orbiting and landing completed, the Mars rover Zhurong is set to begin its exploration. The whole world is waiting to see what it finds.

FCE Scholars Among World’s Top 2% of Scientists

A total of 163 scholars from PolyU have been ranked among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in a recent list compiled by Stanford University. 44 of them are in the Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE), with 12 in the field of Civil Engineering, 11 in the field of Building and Construction, and the rest in various fields. Among local universities, PolyU had the second most scientists in the list of top 2%. The other fields where FCE academics are listed are Geological and Geomatics Engineering, Energy, Logistics and Transportation, Environmental Sciences, Acoustics, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Urban & Regional Planning and Strategic, Defence & Security Studies. The full list is available here. The database of close to 160,000 top scientists in the world is created on the basis of standardized citation indicators such as information on citations, an individual’s scientific research output, co-authorship and a composite indicator for career-long citation impact up to the end of 2019.

New Dean for FCE

Prof. Xiangdong Li, Director of PolyU’s Research Institute of Sustainable Urban Development (RISUD) and Ko Jan Ming Professor in Sustainable Urban Development, has been appointed Dean of the Faculty of Construction and Environment (FCE) from 1 January 2021 upon the retirement of Ir Prof. You-Lin Xu. He thanks Prof. Xu for his leadership and guidance over the last 6 years and wishes his predecessor all the best. Prof. Li began his academic career at PolyU in 1995. He has a PhD in environmental technology from Imperial College London. His major research interests include regional pollution, urban environmental studies, and remediation of contaminated sites. He has published more than 200 papers in leading international journals, and is an author of 15 highly cited papers (top 1%) in Environment/Ecology of the Web of Science database. A past president (2011-2013) of the International Society of Environmental Geochemistry and Health (SEGH), he is currently an associate editor for Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T), a journal published by the American Chemical Society, and serves on the editorial board for several other international journals in related fields.

Results of RGC General Research Fund 2020/21

The 2020/21 application results for the RGC General Research Fund (GRF) and Early Career Scheme (ECS) were announced on 30 June 2020. Due to their similar nature, the application results for these 2 schemes have been combined in some of the above analysis:   In terms of the number of grants, CEE led with 15 grants, followed by both BSE and LSGI with 5 each. As seen from Figure 1, the number of grants secured by individual departments, except CEE, has dropped this year, while the total funding secured by FCE departments has reached over $24 million (Figure 2).   In terms of the average funding amount per academic staff member (only counting those who are eligible), the rankings of our 4 departments in descending order are CEE, LSGI, BSE and BRE. As shown in Figure 2, the average funding received by FCE academic staff has reached a high in the 2020/21 exercise.   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 40% of all GRF/ECS grants allocated in these disciplines. The distribution of the amount of GRF/ECS funding in 2020/21 among local universities is shown in Figure 4. PolyU received 45% of the total available funding in the CESBC disciplines this year, with an average funding of HK$814K per project.   Of the 28 GRF/ECS grants awarded to the Faculty this year, 3 were awarded outside the CESBC disciplines. The Faculty won 25 grants (or 34.7%) totaling HK$20,961K out of 72 GRF/ECS grants awarded by RGC in the CESBC disciplines in the present round (i.e. 2020/21).

URAP Subject Ranking 2019/20

In the University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) 2019/20, PolyU was ranked third for the subject of Architecture and tenth for the subject of Civil Engineering, the only local university to be in the top ten in both subjects. This was an improvement from the field rankings in 2017/18, where PolyU was 6th and 15th in Architecture and Civil Engineering respectively. Since 2010, URAP has ranked world universities based on academic performance indicators that reflect the quality and the quantity of their scholarly publications. As a non-profit organization, it was established at the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.