2024 RT Amination Banner.gif

China Daily

News> Hong Kong> Content
Thursday, October 29, 2020, 10:26
HKUST president lauds potential
By Kathy Zhang
Thursday, October 29, 2020, 10:26 By Kathy Zhang

Innovative academic structure at planned new Guangzhou campus responds to spiraling industry demand for cross-discipline professionals. Kathy Zhang reports from Hong Kong.

The planned new campus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou has set its sights on training cross-discipline professionals in response to spiraling demand for such talent in innovation and technology, President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Shyy Wei said.

 The innovative academic structure will see postgraduate students in different programs, including microelectronics, data science and analytics, financial technology, robotics and autonomous systems, and bioscience and biomedical engineering — all of which cover emerging industries and most frontier technology, Shyy told China Daily in a one-on-one interview.

Unlike existing programs on the Hong Kong campus, every program on the new campus will involve more than two disciplines and enroll only postgraduates at the first phase, Shyy said.

Unlike other universities, Shyy said, the academic structures of HKUST’s two campuses are deliberately designed to be non-overlapping and complementary.

HKUST has run a related pilot program on its campus in Hong Kong since last year to test the waters. Under the pilot program, the university admitted its first batch of 106 postgraduate students last year and another 150 this year. These students will move to Guangzhou once the new campus is put into service, if they haven’t finished their studies by then.

The new campus in Nansha district, Guangzhou’s pilot development zone at the southernmost part of the city, is expected to be operational in September 2022. The campus is seen as a highlight of HKUST’s foray into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The university has many other endeavors in the Bay Area. In 2007, it jointly established HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute, the first science and research institution with capital from outside the Chinese mainland in Nansha, with the Fok Ying Tung Foundation, to enhance the transfer of science research between Hong Kong and the mainland.

(PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Thanks to the high-speed rail link between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, students and faculty members of the two campuses will be able to share laboratories and research facilities, with traveling time between the two cities reduced to less than an hour.

The university encourages all students to treat the school campus as a living lab and test their research and designs in real scenarios on campus.

Shyy said that innovation and invention always come from life. And that’s what the university did to make the campus smarter and more sustainable. 

With facial-recognition systems for library services installed, students and faculty members who have voluntarily registered to participate in the testing project are able to enter the school library without first tapping their HKUST cards.

An aquaponic system that yields fish and vegetables also has been built on campus to allow students to research how to use the least resources and explore the feasibility of green businesses in Hong Kong. The same effort will be made in the Guangzhou campus. Unmanned vehicles developed by HKUST students and professors may be used as shuttle buses on the campus, he revealed. 

Netting top minds

Attracting talent also takes place at the 40 piloting items tailor-made for Hong Kong’s neighboring city — innovation and technology powerhouse Shenzhen — as part of its new five-year plan. The tech city will map out a standard for “high-end” overseas professionals attracted to the mainland, and  provide eligible applicants China’s talent visa, namely the R visa. R visa holders usually will be granted a stay of five to 10 years.

Shyy believes that these items will boost academic exchanges and communication within the Bay Area and between the area and foreign countries and regions. Appealing to the talented professionals all comes down to what a city can offer, in Shyy’s eyes. 

Born and raised in Taiwan, Shyy, a US-passport-holder, studied and worked in the US for more than 20 years before he moved to Hong Kong in 2010. Shyy said he came because the HKUST promised an open and international research environment and great support to give technology and findings a practical use.

(PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

HK to team up with other Bay cities to revive economy

Innovation and technology will pump new energy into Hong Kong’s ailing economy, while only by working with other cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area can the city push the whole industry forward, the president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology said. 

Shyy Wei described innovation, science and technology as the “nuclei” that can stimulate the city’s economy and bring new possibilities to the fixed economic structure. “But innovation and science technology cannot be something just created out of a vacuum,” Shyy said.

The innovative ideas must go through tests, major adjustments and improvements before they come to fruition, which is not possible in a city of highly concentrated economy, he said.

In fact, many small economies in the world like Hong Kong, such as Israel and Sweden, need to be very open and internationally connected so that they can benefit by working with others who can provide thing they don’t have, he said.

The mega 11-city cluster project can provide what Hong Kong lacks, such as “the whole supply chain, in terms of fabrication, prototyping, iteration and overall support”, he said. “The Greater Bay Area is quite leading, in microelectronics, in miniaturized mechanical parts, even in some renewable energy areas,” the mechanical and aerospace engineer continued.

Shyy said the story of DJI, a world-leading manufacturer of commercial drones, is a good example of the inseparable relationship between Hong Kong and the rest of the Bay Area.

Shyy Wei, president of HKUST. (CALVIN NG / CHINA DAILY)

DJI founder Frank Wang Tao built the first prototype of DJI’s product and flight controllers in his dormitory when he studied at HKUST. He went through HKUST’s incubation project and moved to Shenzhen to set up the company in 2006. The company was incubated for a long while at HKUST’s Industry, Education and Research Building in Shenzhen. Today, DJI is the world’s No 1 drone manufacturer, with a 70 percent of share of the global civilian drone market.

He also cited the example of Yunzhou Intelligent Technology, a leading enterprise dedicated to research, development and production on unmanned vessels in China. Company co-founder Zhang Yunfei, another HKUST alumnus, set up his business in Zhuhai, another city in the Bay Area, in 2010.

They are good examples of how the Bay Area brought in a full industrial chain for innovation and technology, assembling a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that included very upstream-conceptual development and new design thinking, and then testing, refinement and perfection, and onto the downstream of production and commercialization, Shyy said.

This is how different cities in the Bay Area contribute and play their own distinctive strengths, Shyy said. He said these alumni’s stories serve as encouragement for other young scientists. 

‘Tide is turning’

Shyy observed that over the past two years, more enterprises are increasing their investments in research and development after seeing the potential. An example is the construction industry. Shyy revealed that the university is closely working with some world-leading companies from the construction sector to support research and development so that cutting-edge technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence and big data could be used in construction. And he expects it will soon be extended to all sectors.

In July, HKUST signed a cooperative agreement with Guangzhou Metro Group to jointly nurture professionals in intelligent transportation.

As HKUST is working with the Guangzhou municipal government and Guangzhou University to set up a new campus in the capital of Guangdong, Shyy foresees that the university will closely cooperate with more enterprises in the Bay Area to train students.

Contact the writer at kathyzhang@chinadailyhk.com


Share this story

CHINA DAILY
HONG KONG NEWS
OPEN
Please click in the upper right corner to open it in your browser !