Computer Science Artificial intelligence

Lingnan University’s Teaching and Learning Centre is proud to advise that its innovative IDEAL-Gen.AI (Instructional Design Enhanced Active Learning through Generative Artificial Intelligence) platform has garnered international recognition by winning the Bronze Award in the “Best Use of AI” category at the prestigious QS Reimagine Education Awards and Conference 2025.

Prof Song Yongduan, Dean of the School of Data Science and Chair Professor of the Division of Industrial Data Science at Lingnan University, has been elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE). The result was announced today (21 November), naming him one of the 24 newly elected foreign academicians for 2025. The honour recognises Prof Song’s outstanding contributions to control science and engineering at the international level.

On November 17th, Lingnan University’s Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) and The University of Sydney’s Educational Innovation (EI) Team co-hosted a pivotal seminar titled “The Transformation of Global Higher Education Learning Pedagogies: Harnessing the Innovation and Technology Revolution”. With an attendance of approximately 300 participants, both in person and online, the event highlighted the urgency to rethink and revolutionise educational practices to adapt to the AI era.

Three distinguished scholars from Lingnan University have been named Highly Cited Researchers 2025 in the annual list compiled by leading global analytics company in academia and research Clarivate. The list is of exceptional researchers who have demonstrated significant and wide-ranging influence in their respective fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers reflecting their substantial contributions to advancing innovation and addressing global challenges.

Dr Rodrigo emphasized that AI in education must be grounded in culture—responsive to students’ lived experiences, classroom realities, and national contexts.

“The Development and Testing of a Virtual Patient for Philippine Medical Education” was presented in front of policymakers, industry professionals, and leaders from academia on the second day of the two-day conference.

The use of drones in search and rescue, patrolling, and environmental monitoring has become increasingly common. However, their performance is still constrained by complex environmental factors such as harsh weather conditions, and Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu, a leading scholar in artificial intelligence (AI), Associate Vice-President (Strategic Research), Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and J.K. Lee Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and his research team have conducted a pioneering project titled “Key Technologies for Intelligent Enhancement and Content Understanding in Constrained Environments”.

Researchers from SANKEN at The University of Osaka have successfully developed a groundbreaking “self-evolving” edge AI technology that enables real-time learning and forecasting capabilities directly within compact devices. This innovation, termed MicroAdapt, achieves unprecedented speed and accuracy. It processes data up to 100,000 times faster and achieves up to 60% higher accuracy compared to conventional state-of-the-art deep learning methods. This achievement represents a major advance toward next-generation real-time AI applications across manufacturing, automotive IoT, and medical wearables, addressing critical limitations of existing cloud-dependent AI.

The regulatory directions of Agentic AI systems and Open-Source AI have become hot topics globally. In light of this, Lingnan University and the University of Bologna in Italy co-hosted the 2nd International Workshop on Technologies for AI Governance (TAIG) from 25 to 26 October, as part of the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2025). The workshop brought together numerous world-leading experts, academics, and policymakers, aiming to enhance governance in areas such as AI risk assessment, accountability tracking, and safety assurance, and to foster cross-regional exchange on AI governance between Asia and Europe. The two-day event attracted over 150 academics and students.

Lingnan University and Shenzhen Das Intellitech Company Limited (Das Intellitech), a leading company specialising in the research and application of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) today, 23 October. This collaboration will use artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and IoT technologies to advance smart building and low-carbon development initiatives. The two parties will establish a pre-eminent international research laboratory to promote academia-industry-research collaboration, green innovation, and the development of smart city solutions in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, particularly in sustainable carbon-neutral technologies.

Lingnan University continues to participate in annual innovation and technology event the InnoCarnival 2025 (the Carnival), organised by the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC). As one of the programme partners, Lingnan University is showcasing eight innovative "Smart Healthy City" research projects, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and interdisciplinary research. These projects cover healthcare, transportation, sports training, environmental monitoring, and elderly care, and demonstrate how Lingnan’s innovation teams address societal needs and advancing smart city development through technology.

Researchers from The University of Tokyo have found that single cells in collective chemotaxis act like agents in distributed reinforcement learning, utilizing the environment as an “external memory” and exhibiting highly intelligent behavior.

Lingnan University in Hong Kong has entered the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2026. In the latest published results, Lingnan ranked among the world’s top 301–350 out of 2,191 universities from 115 countries or territories, delivering a notable performance across several indicators. These include an impressive 47th place in International Outlook, recognising Lingnan’s achievement in fostering international diversity and collaborative research on a global scale.

With so many environmental issues arising, how can we even begin trying to solve them all? Perhaps, we can start by asking AI. This study highlights how AI can pinpoint viable action plans for these issues.

The University of Osaka researchers developed a reinforcement learning framework that lets dialogue systems efficiently learn new words while asking fewer questions. This approach enhances user experience and enables future systems to naturally acquire family-specific nicknames and expressions, becoming more familiar companions in everyday life.

Lightweight and high-performance framework for remote sensing object detection

Lingnan University has achieved another remarkable milestone in the 2025 edition of the World’s Top 2% Scientists list, published by Stanford University. This year, a total of 43 Lingnan scholars were named in the list, representing an increase of about 50 per cent compared with last year’s 29. Among them, 19 scholars were ranked among the global top 100 in their respective disciplines, underscoring the international recognition of Lingnan’s research excellence and its rising global impact.

Leading scholar in artificial intelligence (AI) Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu, Associate Vice-President (Strategic Research), Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and J.K. Lee Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence at Lingnan University, has been honoured with the 2026 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award for his co-authored paper Learning-Aided Evolution for Optimization. It is the sole paper to receive this award this year, underscoring its importance in the fields of evolutionary computation and AI.

Lingnan University held its Research and Knowledge Transfer Excellence Awards Presentation Ceremony 2025 yesterday, 17 September, honouring 55 faculty members for their outstanding contributions to academic research and knowledge transfer, advancing community well-being and societal progress during the past academic year. The awards included the Outstanding Researcher Award, the Early Career Researcher Award, and the Research & Knowledge Transfer Fund Award, recognising faculty members for their innovative scholarship and impactful initiatives that elevate Lingnan’s global research presence.

Lingnan University President and Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science, Prof S. Joe Qin, welcomed the 2025 Policy Address delivered by Chief Executive, Mr John Lee, highlighting a series of education-related policy initiatives as follows:

Combining multiple sensory inputs has been a big hurdle for developing physical AI robots. Recent research at Tohoku University solves this problem using a brand new approach.

Lingnan University congratulates the “Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou” cluster on achieving the top position in the 2025 Global Innovation Index (GII) Ranking of World’s Top 100 Innovation Clusters. Released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), this ranking recognises the Greater Bay Area’s (GBA) outstanding innovation capacity and its vital strategic role in the global innovation ecosystem.

The School of Graduate Studies (GS) of Lingnan University in Hong Kong hosted the “Empower Your Future” Lingnan Postgraduate Orientation 2025 today, 28 August, welcoming about 3,600 new postgraduate students for the 2025/26 academic year, the highest number ever recorded. The cohort includes students from the Hong Kong SAR, Macau, Mainland China, Canada, France, Portugal, Switzerland, the US, Vanuatu, Ghana, and Cameroon enrolled in taught master’s, doctoral, and MPhil/PhD programmes.

Lingnan University held its 2025/26 academic year New Student Orientation (NSO) and Official Welcome on campus today, 25 August, welcoming over 1,400 new undergraduates from the Hong Kong SAR, the Mainland, and overseas, including students from Germany, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Russia, South Korea, and Vietnam into the Lingnan family.

On 19 August, World Humanitarian Day, Lingnan University announced the signing of an Agreement of Cooperation with the United Nations University (UNU) to establish the UNU Hub on Humanitarian Innovation and Technology at Lingnan University (UNU Hub at Lingnan University), making it the first higher education institution in Asia to set up a UNU Hub. The Hub is scheduled to open officially in October 2025 and will have an annual operating budget of over HK$8 million. Its Humanitarian Innovation and Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) will spearhead research and design initiatives, education and training programmes, and international collaborations, and improve living conditions in developing countries and regions of the Global South by leveraging innovative and cutting-edge technologies. Scholarships will be awarded to encourage local youth to fulfil their ambitions through knowledge and innovation.

Sensitive region detection for improved non-invasive cattle monitoring

The Ateneo de Manila University’s Business Insights Laboratory for Development (BUILD) is looking at ways for artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance human labor in small businesses, which make up the bulk of the Philippine economy.

Researchers at The University of Osaka developed a deep learning model for rapid building damage assessment after floods using satellite imagery. This research establishes the first systematic benchmark for this task and introduces a novel semi-supervised learning method achieving 74% of fully supervised performance with just 10% of the labeled data. A new, lightweight deep learning model named Simple Prior Attention Disaster Assessment Net or SPADANet significantly reduces missed damaged buildings, improving recall by over 9% compared to existing models. This work provides crucial design principles for future AI disaster response, enabling faster and more efficient life-saving operations.