HKUST student team – ENTERPRIZE was awarded the 1^st runner up in the RoboMaster University League (RMUL) 2024. 3 talented students from ISD were part of the core members of the team. We are so proud of you!

The RMUL, which leads by Shenzhen academic institutes and universities, aims to build a community to promote the exchange of robotics technology and support young innovators in the Greater Bay Area. HKUST team enrolled into 3V3 Match, where each team needs to develop Standard, Hero and Sentry robots independently and engage in tactical combat in the designated battlefield. The team with the highest remaining Base HP wins. This year, 8 university teams from Shenzhen and Hong Kong participated in the game, making it even more hostile.

After several rounds of hard matches, ENTERPRIZE was one of the strongest teams with high remaining Base HP and was awarded the 1^st runner up. They have demonstrated excellent robotic control techniques and deployed combating strategies during the game. Hope that they can keep the spirit up and fight with the best in future. Let’s share our respect and love to ENTERPRIZE!

A big round of applause to Prof. Mitch LI and his research team for their accepted article on Advanced Functional Materials, one of the top journals in this field.

The research introduced a new approach to creating 3D microstructures with higher simplicity and repeatability, which is a significant improvement in advanced manufacturing, especially in emerging miniaturized applications, e.g. invasive robotics, minimized drug delivery, implanted batteries and nano photonics. 

Self-assembly is a powerful strategy for creating 3D artificial structures. The existing thin film release techniques limits structural complexity. Prof. Mitch LI and his team proposed a localized laser scribing strategy that can guide the self-assembly of 2D thin films into 3D microstructures. The laser-induced heating and momentum can release the films and roll them into various microstructures. This method allows accurate control of shapes, curvatures, orientations, and sizes for the fabricated rolls. No pre-patterning or post-drying is needed. The flexibility and simplicity of this method represents a significant improvement over existing self-assembly techniques and may enrich thin film self-assembly materials and applications.

Let’s take a look at this video and understand how a localized laser scribing strategy prepares gold micro-rolls.

Congratulations to Prof. Sai-Kit Yeung and Ms Haixin Liang (Mphil student of ISD) for getting their groundbreaking research paper selected as a 'Highlight' in the top-tier conferences -  IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024. The research team presents the first foundation model for coral image segmentation and has hopes to turn it into a new standard tool for coral visual research.

Coral is one of the key indicators of marine research due to coral’s rich biodiversity and sensitivity to small environmental changes. However, segmenting coral is no easy task due to its irregular boundaries and degraded water quality. Therefore, underwater coral visual understanding has gained increasing attention within the computer vision community. Prof. Yeung and his team introduced CoralSCOP, the first foundation model that can segment dense coral reef automatically and has strong generalization ability to project the full image of coral reef. The model also offers user-defined tuning and sparse-to-dense conversion for precise coral statistics. To maximize its usage, the team also incorporated mask-referring segmentation and instruction-following segmentation so that both amateurs and advanced researchers could master the model.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) ranks top on Research.com’s 2023 Best Computer Science Conference List. Among the 11.532 valid papers, only 2.8% of them were selected as highlights. This appreciate recognizes the innovation of ISD and Prof. Yeung’s team. The research results contribute to human capacity in underwater computer vision research and signify HKUST’s advanced ability in Marine AI research.

For more information about CoralSCOP, please visit the website: https://coralscop.hkustvgd.com.

ISD is honoured to have Mr Freddy Lee, Chief Executive Officer, and Ms Vanessa Wo, Assistant General Manager of Corporate Communications of SOCAM Development Limited to present the the Shui On Innovation Fund Student Awards 2022-23 to three outstanding teams: Realcycle, EIT Fitness and TramEx.

Shui On Innovation Fund aims to support the learning, innovation and project development of ISD students and nurture a new generation of technology innovators. Part of the fund is allocated as Student Awards in recognition of outstanding projects. Through rigorous selection process by ISD faculty and representatives from SOCAM Development Limited, only the best student group from each study year could receive this meaningful award.

Realcycle – Outstanding project from year 2
Fields: Computer vision & model training, spectrometry sorting mechanism for integrated bottle recycle to increase plastic recycling success rate
Awardees: Ho Fung LAU, Lai Yin Garmisch WONG, Pak Long WONG, Yan Ki WAN, Cheuk You Tweety KWAN

EIT Fitness – Outstanding project from year 3
Fields: Human tissue real-time monitoring system, gym monitoring, electrodes & machine learning
Awardees: Chuyue GONG, Qixuan Li, Haosong ZHONG

TramEx – Outstanding project from year 4
Fields: Advertising, configurable tram interior and spatial design for interactive and immersive tram experience
Awardees: Yin Colman CHEUK, Man Hei CHONG, Chun Hei Brandon LAW, Hei Yui Jasmine LI, Man Yin WONG

Our RoboMaster team defeated 6 other university teams from the Greater Bay Area and earned a championship honour in the 2023 Pioneer of Zero Carbon GBA New Energy Powerboat Challenge.

The competition consisted of an Endurance challenge and an Obstacle race. Each team controlled a 300kg solar energy-powered boat and raced at highest 15km/h in Songshan Lake of Dongguan Science and Technology Industrial Park. With an all-out effort, HKUST RoboMaster Team demonstrated excellent hands-on ability and knowledge of Powerboat, and finally won the overall championship.

Let’s share the news and show our support our RoboMaster members!

A big around of applause to ISD MPhil student, Turzo Bose, in receiving Silver Award of HKICT Start-up Award in Social Impact and HKSTPC Technopreneur Award in 2023. His project, Seekr, aims to assist visually impaired groups in space navigation.

Under the supervision of Professor Tristan BRAUD, Turzo has been fighting to invent a tool to help the visually impaired and the elderly navigate in a safe and respectful manner. Therefore, he invented Seekr – a compact AI smart wearable that is designed to assist the groups in evaluating and travelling independently. This invention hopefully revolutionizes the way that visually impaired groups experience the world.

Congratulations to our ISD Alumni FUNG Ka Yan (Gabby) in receiving the HKICT Student Innovation Award in 2023, recognizing her project on AI Robot for SENs, which provides a training solution for students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) in the early stage.

People with SpLDs are intellectually competent but are greatly hindered by the ability of processing and conceptualizing language-based information. Recent research has unveiled that early-stage intervention, i.e., training before 6 years old, could effectively boost their learning curve in language processing. Gabby saw the lack of solutions in the market and took the lead in developing an AI system to train their memory capacity and sentence expansion skills through Chinese vocabulary and short sentence games.

The product is a combination of various technologies, including AI, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) method, data visualization, empathic design methodology, and scaffolding skills. Gabby’s product has helped 100 students from local primary schools to receive basic training of the robotic games. Gabby and team will continue to bring a pleasant learning environment and empower students with SpLDs to unleash their full potentials.