KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER THE REVIEW2020 ACCOLADES Two start-ups with roots in HKU received international recognition in 2020, while an impactful initiative on HIV / AIDS was honoured with the University’s Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award. Making Progress against HIV / AIDS Professor Zhiwei Chen, who helped establish the HKU AIDS Institute in 2007, has influenced government policy in AIDS prevention and control, raised community awareness, and made a breakthrough in vaccine technology that is also being put to work to search for an effective COVID-19 vaccine. These achievements earned him the University’s Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award. One of the earliest initiatives of the AIDS Institute was to convince government, clinicians, NGOs and the wider community that treating AIDS patients could help prevent infection. This work involved not only scientific publications but outreach to the media and the public. Professor Chen and his team also organised community fundraising activities for more than 500 AIDS orphans in Mainland China to signal their commitment to patient well-being. Their efforts paid off in 2017, when the ‘treatment as prevention’ approach became government policy in Hong Kong. “When you reduce the source of the virus, definitely you will see some reduction [in infections]. For HIV, it’s using treatment as a biomedical intervention to minimise secondary transmission,” he said. Alongside that work, Professor Chen and his team have also pursued a vaccine or cure for HIV / AIDS. In 2013, they made a breakthrough in vaccine technology and they have been working with a Hong Kong start-up to develop a new biomedical product based on their discoveries, which will soon go to clinical trial. Moreover, this work has given him important insights about vaccine creation in general, which he is now applying in the search for an effective vaccine against COVID-19. A Win for Mental Health A team of HKU students was named World Champion in the 2020 Microsoft Imagine Cup for an innovative app that blends artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to help people, especially youths, assess their mental health and provide help if needed. The Hollo app asks users to complete a standard questionnaire and respond to a few questions via video to detect facial expressions and other non-verbal cues. These are combined with information, such as users’ use of social media and other apps, to assess their mental state with reference to the latest research from psychology. Users who display symptoms of mental stress, such as poor sleep and social isolation, are suggested to do targeted activities provided by the app to improve their mood. Where symptoms are severe, they are recommended to seek professional help and contacts are provided. The app was developed with input from a team of experts working in the mental health field in Hong Kong, who also sit on Hollo’s advisory board and have given ongoing feedback as the app has been developed and refined. Privacy concerns have also been addressed – the app extracts data points from videos then deletes them so only numbers, not names, for users remain, and users control who sees their data and what data they can access. The driving force behind the app is Cameron van Breda, who is in his final year of a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology and biotechnology with a minor in science entrepreneurship. He recruited Ajit Krishna Namakkal Raghavendran, a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science student, to help him develop and refine Hollo. Cameron was inspired by his own and his friends’ struggles with mental stress, as well as the course Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which was offered by the Faculty of Social Sciences. “I have always had a passion for social projects and this course gave me the idea that I could have a career revolving around something with social impact,” he said. The Microsoft Imagine Cup win comes with a US$100,000 cash prize, US$50,000 in credits on Azure, the cloud computing service used by Hollo, and a private session with Microsoft’s CEO. Honours for Innovations HKU spin-off company Fano Labs was named one of the top five winning teams from a field of more than 500 in the JUMPSTARTER 2020 Global Pitch Competition organised by Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, while student team entry ClearBot won the JUMPSTARTER IdeaPOP!, a pitching competition organised globally for student start-ups. Fano Labs is a deep technology company co-founded by Dr Miles Wen, HKU alumnus and Adjunct Assistant Professor, and Professor Victor Li On-kwok, Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Sustainable Development and Chair Professor of Information Engineering. It has developed products based around automatic speech recognition and natural language processing that have been adopted by more than a dozen governments and banking, telecom, airline, and utilities enterprises around Asia to enhance customer services, compliance and other lines of business. The JUMPSTARTER award included up to US$5 million in investment commitments and a total cash prize of US$100,000, and is in addition to other recognition for Fano Labs over the past year such as being selected an Accenture FinTech Innovation Lab (the only startup from Hong Kong selected), receiving additional investment from Alibaba, being named one of six Designated Local Research Institutes by the Hong Kong government, and winning in the Innovation and Creativity category of the 2019 Hong Kong Awards for Industries. “We received early support from HKU when we started out and it gave us a foothold to develop our technology and grow our start-up. The awards and recognition we’ve had over the past year are going to take us to the next level,” Dr Wen said. ClearBot, meanwhile, is an AI-driven robotic system that collects plastic waste in water automatically, providing a solution for marine plastic waste. Apart from JUMPSTARTER, it won first runner-up in the Student Competition of the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit in London. The team is comprised of Sidhant Gupta, a 2019 graduate of Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering, and Angel Woo Chung-yu, Utkarsh Goel, Ahmed Abbas Alvi and Ma Jiacheng from the Engineering and Science Faculties. Sidhant has also been involved in developing a robotic device to map coral reefs and an affordable braille reader that works with smartphones, among other inventions. He has founded his own robotics and imaging company in Hong Kong. “HKU has provided a lot of opportunities for students,” he said. “We are now keen to get ClearBot commercialised.” Professor Zhiwei Chen (first from left) was honoured with the Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award 2019 for the project titled ‘Knowledge Exchange on HIV / AIDS to Promote HIV Prevention and Care’. Hollo was named the 2020 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Champion for a mental health companion web application leveraging Azure analytics and AI services to advance youth therapy practices . HKU spin-off company Fano Labs Limited was named one of the top five winning teams in the JUMPSTARTER 2020 Global Pitch Competition. 34 | 35
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