Behind every great innovation lies a design sensibility, something that might be imperceptible to users but is in fact a vital element of design thinking that yields human-centered innovative solutions. HKUST’s Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) has a lofty goal of nurturing a new generation of innovators via project-based learning, enabling them to chart an empathic course to meet people’s needs through the use of technology.
Innovation driven by struggles
Founded by ISD student Iain LAM, Sallux Education is an education center that uses technology to help academically challenged students in primary and secondary schools. It is an endeavor born out of Iain's own struggles with dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a child.
“The learning difficulties couldn’t have been worse. In the traditional Hong Kong local curriculum, every student was required to sit in a very conventional classroom context and then do a lot of homework every day,” says Iain, who is the CEO and is now in his final year of MSc in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship, which requires every student to launch a start-up as one of the entrepreneurship components.
Like many young students with dyslexia, Iain had particular problems memorizing the English alphabet, and he describes the environment in the classroom as “toxic” despite him being a hard-working student. “My teacher and my classmates did not understand what difficulties I was going through.”
Gamified learning
Iain’s innovative approach has managed to improve the learning experience of struggling students by gamifying the process, particularly with the use of Virtual Reality (VR) and Modified Reality (MR).
Putting on their headsets, the SEN students are fully engaged in an immersive virtual learning environment, enabling them to focus on lectures for at least 20 minutes and to complete tasks in a non-distracting environment.
We often see SEN students bad at school but good at gaming. It’s not that their abilities are low but just the traditional way of learning doesn’t feed them with enough motivation, which is what our ‘play to learn’ approach and VR learning environment offer,” says Iain.
To date, 75 SEN students have taken part in the interactive tutorial sessions since the platform was launched. “We’re not only helping them to cope with schoolwork and exams, but also to build their self-esteem and find their own character.” This, says Iain, is one of the project’s greatest achievements. He has also brought three of his former students on board in the company, with one as Chief Operating Officer and engineer.
This innovative solution for education has earned Iain a Chinachem Prime Movership scholarship, which aims to support ISD students with high achievements in innovative technologies design and who have entrepreneurial potential. This year, the scholarship was awarded to 14 students.
While the pandemic presented a number of challenges, not least economic difficulties, Iain says the scholarship has come in a timely manner.
“The pandemic directly impacted us financially so the scholarship came at a right time and ensured all my five staff got paid,” says Iain, adding that the recognition helps the company develop further; he has plans for potentially expanding the platform to the Mainland.
Digital pet guarding emotional health
Another awarded project is the Year-2 undergraduate team’s IRIS project, which has harnessed the concept of a virtual pet to provide wellness support to students experiencing isolation or loneliness. The palm-sized digital pet provides not only interaction and companionship to users with sound and visual feedback, but also emotional assessment to raise users’ awareness on their mental health.
The team has used different technologies, such as 3D printing, haptics and machine learning, to produce the prototypes and the next step for the project is to enter production through crowdfunding; should they manage to scale up sufficiently, they hope to be able to reach a retail price of HK$600-800.
Educational outreach
All the scholarship recipients are testimony to the ISD’s early success, with students equipped with the wherewithal to better integrate design into their projects, thereby producing more human-centered and impactful products. “When we first started in 2017, a lot of effort was put into educational outreach –what it means to marry engineering and design, why design thinking and systems thinking are crucial at this level of undergraduate education, and how the ISD’s student-centric curriculum, along with industry collaborative support, provides the rich and inspiring bedrock for our students to grow,” says Winnie LEUNG, Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the ISD.
“Our ultimate goal is to nurture a new generation of innovators who can work across multiple disciplines and create disruptive innovations to solve the world’s great challenges.”
Read More: https://hkust.edu.hk/news/research-and-innovation/when-empathic-design-meets-innovation
17 June 2022
14:00 (HKT)
Online
Electric manipulation of magnetization is essential for the integration of magnetic functionalities in integrated circuits. Spin-orbit torque (SOT), originating from the coupling of electron spin and orbital motion through spin-orbital interaction, can effectively manipulate magnetization. Symmetry breaking plays an important role in spintronics based on SOT. SOT requires inversion asymmetry in order to have a net effect on magnetic materials, which is commonly realized by spatial asymmetry: a thin magnetic layer sandwiched between two dissimilar layers.
Dr. Jac Leung is a Lecturer in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has attained B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Doctor of Education from The University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Leung is a seasoned trainer, facilitator and supervisor for student innovation projects. He is dedicated to promoting human-centred approaches and project-based learning practices. He is a co-author of the book AI Literacy in K-16 classrooms. He is the project leader and advisor of various projects related to Generative AI in teaching and learning (sum ~HKD4M).
Since 2012, Dr. Leung has dedicated his career to promoting a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach in authentic, project-based, and experiential learning environments. His teaching and research interests include design-based learning, EdTech, design and systems thinking, AI literacy, and self-determination theory.
Finding joy in electronics repair | Mashiat Lamisa | TEDxTinHauWomen
Full Video: Finding joy in electronics repair | Mashiat Lamisa | TEDxTinHauWomen - YouTube
"Your relationship with this phone will last two years before it's outdated and buggy." Imagine if every smartphone came with this label. Frustrated with the throwaway culture around devices, Mashiat asks us to question our current throwaway attitude towards electronics.
Mashiat Lamisa, a socially conscious product and design engineer, wants to make tech accessible to all. She loves to harness her innovative thinking and design acumen to find solutions for the most pressing societal challenges. She co-founded Asia’s first electronic device repair community and also takes electronics that cannot be repaired or fixed and turns them into jewellery.
Imagine wearing a chipset pendant and earrings from your old phone or laptop. This Changemaker and Climate Action Innovation awardee wants to create a big impact in the realm of electronic waste upcycling.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
“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
IWD X HKUST
Primary Appointment: Dept of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Dr. Mingming Fan is an Assistant Professor in the Computational Media and Arts (CMA) thrust at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ). He was an Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology between 2019 and 2021. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2019 and an MS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University. His research interests lie in the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Aging and Accessibility, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, his research focuses on AI-Assisted User Experience (UX) Design, Accessibility and Assistive Technology, AR/VR, and Mobile and Wearable Interaction. His research has been published at top-tier conferences and journals, such as CHI, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), UbiComp/IMWUT, ASSETS, ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). His research has won a Best Paper Award at CHI 2019, a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at UbiComp 2015, and a Best Artifact Award (2nd Place) at ASSETS 2020.
Primary Appointment: Computational Media and Arts Thrust Area
Naubahar Sharif is Professor of Public Policy at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His research interests include science, technology and innovation (STI) policy in Hong Kong and within the ‘Greater Bay Area’ of Southern China; automation in China; and the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. In 2011 he completed the Executive Education program in Innovation for Economic Development at Harvard University. At HKUST, Naubahar has been nominated for the Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching, also having won the Interdisciplinary Programs Office’s Teaching Excellence Award (in 2020), the School of Humanities and Social Science (SHSS) Best Teacher Award (twice, in 2009 and 2016), and one of his courses was nominated for the Common Core Excellence award. Naubahar has been awarded both ‘Public Policy Research’ (PPR) and ‘General Research Fund’ (GRF) grants by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC). Currently, Naubahar is a co-investigator for two ‘Strategic Public Policy Research’ (SPPR) grants awarded by Hong Kong’s Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office (PICO) as well as a cross-institutional ‘Collaborative Research Fund’ (CRF) grant also awarded by the RGC. Naubahar’s research has had a demonstrable impact on business and his research was one of HKUST’s few ‘impact case study’ submissions (sole-authored) for its 2020 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
Primary Appointment: Division of Public Policy
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.