Architecture

Chinese cities are undergoing great spatial restructuring as the economic emphasis transforms from manufacturing to service industries, and this research – ‘Intraurbation Location of Producer Services in Guangzhou, China’ – has advanced the understanding of those changes. Authors Dr Yi Hong, Dr Yang Fan and Professor Anthony Yeh Gar-on discovered the distribution pattern of producer services has changed from dispersed to centripetal development towards the new business district.

Arts

In his book Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War, Professor Xu Guoqi has created a detailed study of a hitherto little documented part of China’s history, its participation in WWI. China’s major contribution was sending some 140,000 labourers to Europe to free up Allied soldiers for the battlefront. The book is a significant contribution to the literature on WWI, offering a Chinese perspective on the world crisis.

Business and Economics

‘Intellectual Capital and Financing Decisions: Evidence from the US Patent Data’ explores a question previously left untackled in capital structure literature. Authors Professor Liu Qiao and Professor Wong Kit-pong provide a tractable theoretical framework in which to study intellectual capital in a standard dynamic model, and identify it as a key determinant of capital structure.

Dentistry

A substantial team led by Dr Rory Munro Watt contributed to the paper ‘Structural and Functional Insight into the Mechanism of an Alkaline Exonuclease from Laribacter Hongkongensis’, research which enhances the basic understanding of DNA repair processes in microorganisms involved in oral and systemic diseases. The paper specifically reported the three-dimensional X-ray crystal structure of an exonuclease protein from the bacterium Laribacter Hongkongensis, which was first discovered in Hong Kong.

Education

Dr Law Wing-wah’s book Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Global Age: Politics, Policies, and Practices in China sheds new light on the field of globalisation and citizenship. Covering different periods, from two millennia ago to contemporary China, it is one of the first studies to theoretically examine, with empirical data, how the politics, policies and practices of citizenship and citizenship education in China respond to domestic social change and global change.

Engineering

A critical component in the operation of wireless sensor networks, ‘network clock synchronisation’ is usually studied from the point of view of network protocol. But in their paper ‘Clock Synchronization of Wireless Sensor Networks’, Dr Wu Yik-chung, Dr Qasim Chaudhari and Professor Erchin Serpedin take an innovative signal processing approach which has led to several significant advances in the area.

Law

Dr Shahla Ali enters a relatively new area of research in her book Resolving Disputes in the Asia-Pacific Region: International Arbitration and Mediation in East Asia and the West. She examines how different cultures approach conflict within the context of the integration of global markets, presenting empirical research on the attitudes and perceptions of arbitrators, judges and lawyers across China and much of Asia as well as North America and Europe.

Medicine

A 17-strong team contributed to ‘Long-term Evolution and Transmission Dynamics of Swine Influenza A Virus’, a paper offering key insights into the processes which lead to influenza pandemics in humans. Genetic analyses of influenza viruses in swine in China over the past 15 years and of previous studies in the region going back 34 years, revealed how hybrid viruses with gene segments acquired from multiple virus lineages emerged. The research unravelled the steps leading to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009.

Science

The Dirichlet distribution has a wide variety of uses in statistical literature and applications, yet Professor Ng Kai-wang, Patrick SC Poon Professor in Statistics and Actuarial Science, Dr Tian Guoliang and Dr Tang Man-lai recognised a need to extend the Dirichlet family of distributions in different directions in order to enrich the application methodologies. In their book, Dirichlet and Related Distributions: Theory, Methods and Applications, they systematically present the flexible parametric classes of distributions they developed, including the Grouped Dirichlet Distribution and the Nested Dirichlet Distribution.

Social Sciences

In their paper, ‘The Causality Analysis of Climate Change and Large-scale Human Crisis’, a team of seven from Social Sciences revealed the results of research indicating climate change as a root cause of general crises in pre-industrial societies. The team analysed a large amount of fine-grained, agro-economical, socio-economic and demographical data and climate functions in Europe from AD1500 to AD1800. This is the first scholarly work to verify scientifically a causal link between climate change and human crisis.