The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology launched a three-year scheme on Tuesday, turning its campus into a lab for students and staff to test their smart and creative solutions to real-life challenges.
About HK$50 million from the university’s own fund will be injected into the program called Sustainable Smart Campus (SSC) as a living lab scheme.
The university hopes to instill a culture of learning from failure and self-initiated changes, which is expected to spread beyond the campus
Shyy Wei
HKUST President
The initiative aims to inspire school stakeholders to experiment with new ideas and cutting-edge technologies and engage in cross-disciplinary cooperation.
Regarding a university as a microcosm of society, HKUST President Shyy Wei said the initiative is to encourage students and faculty members to turn their ideas into reality and test their approaches in real-life scenarios.
He said the university hopes to instill a culture of learning from failure and self-initiated changes, which is expected to spread beyond the campus.
With such endeavor, Shyy believes the campus will become greener, more livable and human centric.
Under the program, nine projects stood out in the first round of selection. They include using facial recognition technology to give library users greater convenience, setting up a real-time big data platform to help users arrange their timetables more efficiently on campus, and changing the souvenir shop’s existing price labels to electronic ones.
Lo Hong-kam, director of the GREAT Smart Cities Center at the HKUST, said the second round of submissions for SSC project proposals is now open till March 22.
He said the projects are jointly developed by faculties, staff, students and alumni. Since the university raised the concept, he said, many industry partners and government agencies have explored collaborative opportunities with the HKUST.
“The scheme will contribute to transforming otherwise abstract smart city concepts into sustainable and smart realities,” Lo said.
User data will be collected and used in accordance with the university’s data privacy policy, he said. People who want to use facial recognition for library services should register to use the service and agree to the Personal Information Collection Statement and terms of use, to give consent to the collection of their personal data.
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