OTHER ISSUES

 

RECENT FOCUS

Our Prof. Chan Shui Duen (Research Professor, CBS) and Prof. Zhu Xinhua (Professor, CBS) have been awarded the Team Award – Knowledge Transfer: Society under the President’s Awards 2021 for their outstanding achievement in knowledge transfer. Research and service projects led by the team have shaped the Chinese language curriculum and assessment in Hong Kong since 2000.

The University recognises the distinguished accomplishments and contributions of staff members through the President’s Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Categorised into individual and team awards, the accolades are given in the areas of teaching, research and scholarly activities, knowledge transfer, and services.

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Prof. Li Ping, Chair Professor of Neurolinguistics and Bilingual Studies and Dean of Faculty of Humanities, has been elected by the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as an AAAS Fellow. The Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished” each year. Prof. Li is honoured for his distinguished contributions to the cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling of bilingualism and the bilingual brain.

The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Its mission is to “advance science and serve society.” AAAS Fellows are among the most distinct honours within the scientific community. The 2021 class of AAAS Fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators from around the world spanning scientific disciplines.

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Prof. Chu Hung-lam, Chair Professor of Chinese Culture and Chang Jiang Scholars Chair Professor of Pre-modern Chinese History at our Faculty, was recently named one of the five members for the “Scholar’s Workshop” Scheme, a new initiative sponsored by the Chinese Academy of History.

In line with this initiative, “Zhu Honglin (Chu Hung-lam) Studio/Workshop of the Chinese Academy of History” was established on December 31, 2021 and inaugurated on January 3, 2022. The studio/workshop consists of 13 members headed by the lead expert Zhu Honglin (Chu Hung-lam) and expert scholars from three Institutes in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one Institute in the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, and eight leading universities in China. The studio/workshop has launched its main research project, titled “The Theory and Practice of Local Governance in Chinese History and Its Contemporary Implications”.

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The project “Multilingual Communication Training and Cross-Cultural Communication Course for Future Leaders”, led by our Chair Professor Huang Chu-Ren(CBS), has received a support of HK$539,642 from the Gifted Education Fund (GEF). The project will run for 15 months and the beneficiary target is Secondary 1 to Secondary 5 students. With the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies being the host of this project, its partners include the Department of English and Communication, HK PolyU-PKU Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, Centre for Translation Studies, Research Centre for Professional Communication in English, International Research Centre for the Advancement of Healthcare Communication, and the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

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Dr Emmanuele Chersoni (Research Assistant Professor of CBS)’s application for the PROCORE-France/HK Joint Research Scheme 2021/22 has been successful. Dr Chersoni’s project is one of the eight projects awarded Hong Kong-wide and the only successful project at the University. The two-year project is entitled “Exploring the Influence of Discourse Connectives on the Predictions of Humans and Pretrained Language Models”.

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Dr Si Chen(CBS) and her research team has been awarded HK$2M by the University’s Project of Strategic Importance Scheme. The funded project is entitled “Robot-assisted speech and musical training in improving speech prosody production and processing by Cantonese-speaking autistic children”. Twenty-six applications were submitted for this round of exercise and fourteen of them were funded.

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The Inter-Faculty Collaboration Scheme (IFC) is a joint funding mechanism supporting inter-Faculty collaborative research among FH, FHSS and FENG. Two projects led by our Faculty members have been funded in the first and second rounds of the IFC:

• "What Can We Learn of Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) from Discourse Comprehension? A Neural Speech Tracking Study"
  (PI: Prof. William S-Y. Wang(CBS); Co-PIs: Prof. Choi Kup Sze Thomas(SN) and Dr Qin Jing Harry(SN))
  Funding awarded: HK$489,934
• "Investigating Changes in Mass and Quality of Swallowing Muscles in Aging Individuals with or without Dysphagia Using Ultrasonography"
  (PI: Dr Elaine Kwong(CBS); Co-Is: Prof. Yongping Zheng(BME) and Dr Angela Leung(SN))
  Funding awarded: HK$497,768

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EVENTS

• (20 May 2022) The Writing Roundtable 2022
• (22-25 June 2022) 17th International Conference on Language and Social Psychology
• (13-15 July 2022) 20th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication, Medicine, and Ethics