Lighting Breakthrough A Theme-based Research Scheme project on sustainable lighting has resulted in a new LED system that not only has high energy efficiency and luminous efficacy, but also a lifetime exceeding 10 years and a high content of recyclable materials (more than 80 per cent). This is the first sustainable LED street lighting system in the world to tick all of these boxes. The system was developed by Professor Ron Hui Shu-yuen, Philip K.H. Wong Wilson K.L. Wong Professor in Electrical Engineering, and Chair of Power Electronics in the Faculty of Engineering, and tested for three years in more than 100 street lamps in Heshan City in Guangdong province. The system has proven to be highly reliable and the company that has licensed this technology now plans to extend it to more than 8,000 street lamps in Mainland China. At the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, held in April 2018, the system was awarded a Gold Medal with Special Recognition by the International Jury of Experts and the Prize of Patent Office of Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf – GCCPO. Professor Hui and his team have also developed other lighting innovations such as a smart system for precise dimming and colour control of bi-colour LED lamps, as well as various applications for their research. Learning What It Takes to be a Digital Citizen A multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research project is being led by Professor Nancy Law of the Faculty of Education to develop deep, evidence-based understanding of the impact of digital media on the everyday lives of children and youths, and on their development as citizens in a technology-intensive, globally connected world. The five-year project was the first education-focused project to be funded under the Theme-based Research Scheme, awarded in 2016 with a total grant of $22.2 million. Professor Law’s team includes scholars from HKU and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as well as international scholars, who have expertise in education, the humanities, information science and computer engineering. Their work is focused on five goals: develop a conceptual framework for digital citizenship; develop age-appropriate instruments for assessing digital citizenship among youths aged seven to 22; identify and further develop indicators for digital technology use, environments for formal and informal learning interactions, and activities likely to influence digital competence; develop game designs that foster digital citizenship in selected contexts for children and adolescents; and conduct longitudinal studies on the development of digital citizenship, which could have a possibility of being continued beyond the project’s lifetime. In 2018 the project began its main data collection exercise. It also jointly organised a course on cyber-wellness and basic game design skills for primary and secondary school students, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Playground Association, Hong Kong Education City and Microsoft Hong Kong. RESEARCH AND INNOVATION HKU scholars published 5,146 peer-reviewed (refereed) publications in 2017–18 and raised the impact of their research through collaborations across disciplines and with community partners. Innovate and Translate A team of HKU mechanical engineers has developed a robot capable of performing neurosurgeries inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The innovation won the team the Best Conference Paper Award at the largest international forum for robotic scientists, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in May 2018 in Australia. The lead author was PhD student Guo Ziyan, who is the first female lead author of a Best Paper at the conference since the award was established in 1993. The HKU team worked with professors of surgery from the Chinese University of Hong Kong to develop a system that is driven by liquid and does not interfere with the powerful magnetic field of MRIs, and used it to perform deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease. In conventional surgery, patients would need to be awake to ensure the electrode placement was going well, but with the robot, the surgeons can guide the procedure while patients are under general anaesthesia. “The success of this project represents a major step towards safer, more accurate and effective brain surgery. It is believed all these An MRI Robot to Improve Brain Surgery components can also be applied to other interventions requiring MRI guidance, such as cardiac catheterisation and prostate and breast biopsies,” said Ms Guo, who was elated by their conference win. “After stepping down from the stage, I started to think how to keep this momentum and present more impactful work in future.” Leader in sustainable LED lighting, Professor Ron Hui Shu-yuen. Guo Ziyan and her team (left to right) Dong Ziyang, Brian Lee Kit-hang, research supervisor Dr Kwok Ka-wai, Justin Ho Di-lang, Cheung Chim-lee and Jacky Fu Hing-choi. The MRI robot can perform neurosurgeries. ︱21 20︱
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