“We all have the strength to build our dreams fearlessly. Being a woman in engineering ignites this strength and paves the way to #BreakTheBias.” says Mashiat Lamisa, a graduate of the HKUST’s Division of Integrative Systems and Design. 

International Women’s Day on March 8 is a time to celebrate the achievements – social, economic, cultural, and political – of women worldwide.

Mashiat Lamisa arrived in Hong Kong almost five years ago from Bangladesh. But images from her home country of children rummaging through toxic rubbish, some of it imported electronic waste (e-waste), have not left her.

“Electronic goods – whether it’s an iPhone or a laptop – are designed to break, and a lot of these devices are discarded as e-waste and end up in landfills in Hong Kong – or third world places like my home country, causing heavy pollution and toxicity,” says the 23-year-old.

In 2021, the World Health Organization released a report on the impact of e-waste on human health and found that those working to recover valuable materials such as copper and gold from the growing global tide of e-waste are at risk of exposure to more than 1,000 harmful substances, including lead, mercury and nickel.

Passionate about global health and sustainability, Lamisa got busy with Projekt, a social enterprise that teaches people how to fix their devices instead of throwing them out.

Driven by its “universal right to repair” philosophy, Projekt wants people to rethink consumerism and e-waste to help the environment.

“There’s a lot of stress, money and regulations around repairing devices, so we set up workshops to show people how easy it is to fix them,” says Lamisa, a graduate of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Integrative Systems and Design course.

“We take dead devices, dismantle them, and upcycle them into jewellery – it’s also a good way for people to see the inner workings of their electronics,” she says.

“One woman brought her mum’s old phone to a workshop and made a locket for herself. Now she can keep it forever.”

To read more:

South China Morning Post

On International Women’s Day 2022, three Hong Kong trailblazers for sustainability, social justice and gender equality

IWD X HKUST

SPOTLIGHTS ON WOMEN

Prof. YEUNG Sai-Kit, Associate Professor at the Division of Integrative Systems & Design and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, was recently appointed as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), a leading international scientific journal in the field of computer graphics. Published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the bimonthly journal has an impact factor of 5.414, which ranks the first place among computer graphics journals by Google Scholar.

The appointment is a recognition of Prof. Yeung’s contributions and academic achievements in the computer graphics area, especially his pioneering work on data-driven functional layout design “Make it Home” in SIGGRAPH 2011, and his work on 3D vision and computational design. As the first in HKUST and the only editorial board member representing Hong Kong, Prof. Yeung will work closely with an international team of academic and industry experts to keep up the momentum and scale new heights in the next three years.

“It is really a true honor for me to serve the ACM TOG editorial board and it means a lot to me as I am the first one from my alma mater to perform this role. I believe this appointment will encourage our students to pursue high quality research,” said Prof. Yeung.

TOG has a strong synergy with New York-based ACM SIGGRAPH (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), the premiere conference organization in graphics. With over 50 years of history, ACM SIGGRAPH creates a platform for researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and professionals to exchange the latest updates and promote cross-disciplinary interaction on computer graphics and interactive techniques. Of the six issues published by TOG each year, two are special issues containing the papers presented at the annual SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences. Conversely, authors of papers published in the regular issues of TOG can present their work at the conferences.

Holder of three degrees from HKUST (PhD (ELEC), MPhil (BIEN) & BEng (CPEG)), Prof. Yeung conducts cutting-edge research on 3D reconstruction, understanding, modeling, and redesign, and uses AI techniques for design and content generation, human-robot interaction, and novel algorithms to enhance VR and AR applications.

Recently he has been working closely with marine biologists to develop novel computer vision and graphics techniques and integrative systems, such as underwater semantic simultaneous localization and mapping for marine robots navigation and surveying, 3D reconstruction of local coral communities, and an automated platform for culturing shellfish. These aim to solve a wide range of problems relating to marine biodiversity and sustainability.