Industry Workshop: Latest Developments in AI & Robotics

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Managing Information and Debunking Misinformation in the Time of Covid-19

Our world is facing an unprecedented challenge from the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientists all over the world are working around the clock to understand the virus and find a vaccine. Meanwhile, rumors and other misinformation on this topic has shown to be detrimental to public health. In this talk, I will describe our work in managing scientific information for Covid-19 research, and debunking misinformation on Covid-19 based on scientific evidence.

Prof. Pascale FUNG is a Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science & Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Center for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research center on top of all four schools at HKUST. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society and is on the Advisory Board of Building Agile Governance for AI & Robotics (BGI4AI).

Prof. Fung received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1997. She worked and studied at AT&T Bell Labs (1993~1997), BBN Systems & Technologies (1992), LIMSI, CNRS, France (1991), Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan (1989~1991), and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France (1988). A fluent speaker of seven European and Asian languages, Prof. Fung has been particularly interested in multilingual speech and natural language issues. 

Federated Learning and Privacy-preserving AI Computing 

Data privacy has come to the central stage nowadays, and is widely considered to be one of the most important issues in the next decade. Broader applications of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in areas such as finance or medicine are currently hindered by data silos due to corporate barriers and strict data privacy legislations. Federated learning, a privacy-preserving AI technique, can simultaneously address the demands for privacy protection and data utilization. In this talk, I will introduce our work on federated learning and how federated learning can break down data barriers obstructing new AI applications. 

Prof. Kai CHEN is an Associate Professor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the Director of System Networking Lab (SING Lab) and WeChat-HKUST joint Lab for Artificial Intelligence Technology (WHAT Lab), and the Executive Vice-President of Hong Kong Society of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics (HKSAIR). He received his BS/MS from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2004/2007, and PhD from Northwestern University in 2012. His areas of interest include data center networking, machine learning systems, and privacy-preserving AI infrastructure. His work has been published in various top venues such as SIGCOMM, NSDI and TON, including a SIGCOMM best paper candidate. He is the Steering Committee Co-Chair of APNet, serves on Program Committee of SIGCOMM, NSDI, INFOCOM, etc., and Editorial Board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. 

Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert chemical energy directly to electricity, with water and heat as the only byproducts. They have great potential for both stationary and transportation applications and are expected to help address the energy and environmental problems that have become prevalent in our society. Despite their great promise, they have not been widely adopted mainly due to lower than predicted efficiencies, high cost, and short lifetime. With the commercialization of Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle Mirai in 2015, the development of fuel cells has been accelerated, especially in China. This talk will firstly introduce some fuel cell basics, and then discuss their applications, recent progresses and market analysis. 

Click here to download the PowerPoint slides.

Prof. Minhua SHAO is currently Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at HKUST. He is also the Associate Director of the HKUST Energy Institute, Associate Director of the HKUST Collaborative Innovation Center, Director of the newly developed Sustainable Energy Engineering Undergraduate Program.

He earned BS and MS degrees in chemistry from Xiamen University, and a PhD degree in materials science and engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He joined UTC Power in 2007 working on proton exchange membrane fuel cell and phosphoric acid fuel cell. At UTC, he led the collaboration with Toyota to develop advanced fuel cell vehicle technologies. He was promoted to Technical Fellow (the highest engineering rank) and program manager. In 2013, he joined Ford Motor Company to conduct research on lithium-ion batteries for next generation electric vehicles. He then joined HKUST in 2014. 

He has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles, 1 edited book and filed over 30 US patent applications (16 issued). He is an Associate Editor of Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Vice Chair of Division 5 (Electrochemical Process Engineering and Technology) of the International Society of Electrochemistry, and Treasurer of the Energy Technology Division of The Electrochemical Society. He has also received a number of awards, including the Supramaniam Srinivasan Young Investigator Award from the ECS Energy Technology Division (2014). He is one of the founding members of The Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include fuel cells and advanced batteries.

Energy storage system is the crucial component for the development of renewable energy, smart city and green transportation. However, conventional Li-ion batteries have potential risks of fire explosion, which limits their wide applications in large-scale and populated residential buildings and urban cities. This presentation discusses recent development of aqueous batteries including redox flow batteries (RFBs) and high-voltage aqueous Li-ion batteries. Redox flow batteries offer unique advantages of high efficiency, low cost, scalability and rapid response for grid energy storage. We will discuss strategies to improve the energy density of aqueous RFBs. Developing low-cost and eco-friendly aqueous electrolytes with a wide voltage window is critical to achieve safe, high-energy and sustainable Li-ion batteries. We will discuss a new aqueous electrolyte using the water-miscible polymer poly(ethylene glycol) as the crowding agent to decrease water activity, thereby achieving a wide electrolyte operation window (3.2 V) with low salt concentration (2 m). This new electrolyte design provides a path for designing high-voltage aqueous electrolytes for low-cost and sustainable energy storage. 

Click here to download the PowerPoint slides. 

Prof. Yi-Chun LU received her B.S. degree in Materials Science & Engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 2007. She received her Ph.D. degree in Materials Science & Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA in 2012. She joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2013 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2018.

Prof. Lu is a Founding Member of The Hong Kong Young Academy of Science and Associate editor of <Journal of Materials Chemistry A> published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has had conferred on her various CUHK and international research and teaching awards, including China's Excellent Young Scientists Fund (2019), Young Researcher Award (2016), the University Education Award, (2016), the Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award (2014), and the Early Career Award, Research Grant Council, Hong Kong SAR (2014).

Prof. Lu's research interest centers on developing fundamental understandings and material design principles for clean energy storage and conversion. In particular, her research group focuses on electrode and electrolyte design for high-energy metal-air and metal-sulfur batteries; redox-active components and solution chemistry for redox-flow batteries; mechanistic understanding of interfacial phenomena governing electrochemical energy conversion and storage processes.