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RECENT FOCUS

PolyU is privileged to announce that Prof. Peter Hagoort, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Prof. William Shiyuan Wang, Chair Professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences of PolyU, are bestowed the Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences. The Prize Presentation Ceremony was held on 10 May 2024.

The Chao Prize, initiated and hosted by the Faculty, is named after the late Professor Yuen Ren Chao who is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese language studies. It is an international award that honours scholars and researchers who have made distinguished contributions to language sciences. Click HERE to read more.

PolyU has received generous funding from the Shenzhen iRead Foundation (iRead Foundation) to support the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences and to advance the development of language sciences. Following the donation, PolyU and iRead Foundation will also explore opportunities to foster their academic and public engagement collaborations. Click HERE to read more.

The Faculty hosted its 2nd Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition on 12 June, showcasing the research prowess of our PhD students. The event challenged participants to present their complex research projects in just three minutes, emphasising clarity, conciseness, and effective communication. The winners are as follows:

Champion: Chen Zhuoan Joanna(ENGL)
First runner-up: Ganaah John(ENGL)
Second runner-up: Gu Chanyuan(CBS)

Joanna has subsequently advanced to the university-wide final scheduled for 3 July. We extend our congratulations to Joanna and wish her every success in the university final.

Our MABCC graduate, Ms Emma Yu Sin-wan, who co-founded the inspiring social enterprise Dress Green has been named in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list for 2024. Within an impressive timeframe of just three years following its launch in 2021, the start-up has successfully rescued approximately 3,000 old uniforms and upcycled them into a diverse range of over 4,000 products, including accessories, bags, and hats. Notably, the social enterprise has made a sustainable impact by providing more than 3,500 working hours to support local women and disadvantaged groups, actively contributing to the creation of a sustainable future for our society. Click HERE to read more.

Dr Xuejun Ye, a graduate of our Doctor of Applied Language Sciences (DALS) programme, won the Best Journal Article Award from the Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics. The award-winning article, entitled “Teachers’ stated beliefs and practices regarding L2 motivational strategies: A mixed-methods study of misalignment and contributing factors”, was co-authored with our Associate Dean Prof. Hu Guangwei and published in System, one of the top-tier journals in applied linguistics. The paper is based on Dr Ye’s DALS thesis and reports a study on the misalignments between secondary school English language teachers’ stated beliefs about language learning motivation strategies and their reported practices in the classroom, as well as factors contributing to such misalignments. Click HERE to read the article.

With generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) transforming the social interaction landscape in recent years, large language models (LLMs), which is trained on massive amount of text data using the next-word prediction task, have been put in the spotlight. A recent study led by our Faculty Dean Prof. Li Ping found that LLMs perform more like the human brain when being trained in more similar ways as humans process language, which has brought important insights to brain studies and the development of AI models. Click HERE to read more.

Research on the health and other structural issues faced by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, conducted by Prof. Hans Ladegaard, Dr Jeffry Oktavianus and Dr Margo Turnbull of our Department of English and Communication is featured in a local newspaper. Click HERE to read more.

Our Faculty Dean and Sin Wai Kin Foundation Professor in Humanities and Technology Prof. Li Ping participated in the Hangzhou-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Conference on 21 June, sharing insights about the model set by PolyU for such between-city collaborations. At the conference the Dean provided details on the establishment and operation of the PolyU-Hangzhou Technology and Innovation Research Institute. The conference was organised by the Hang Shi Cooperation and joined by a delegation of global representatives led by Executive Director Margaret Fong of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

The University and the Hangzhou Gongshu District People’s Government signed an agreement to promote collaboration through the PolyU-Hangzhou Technology and Innovation Research Institute in 2023.

A delegation led by Mr Chris Sun, Secretary for Labour and Welfare, paid a visit to PolyU on 3 June. The delegation toured the Speech Therapy Unit and the Speech and Language Sciences Laboratory, where they learned about PolyU’s advanced facilities, research initiatives, and educational programmes in relation to Speech Therapy. They also gained insights into the University's efforts in nurturing future-ready multidisciplinary professionals who can effectively put theory into practice. Click HERE to read more.

EVENTS

• (2 July 2024) Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Hybrid Agencies in Human - Artificial Agents Interactions (to be given by Dr Anna CIAUNICA, Principal Investigator, Centre for Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, and Research Associate, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London)
• (3 July 2024) PolyU Three Minute Thesis Competition (Final)
• (8-12 July 2024) Tsinghua University, the University of Macau and PolyU Tripartite Exchange Programme
• (18 July 2024) Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Rethinking ‘Cultural Thought Patterns’: Translanguaging and Intercultural Communication