Author: Professor Hon Ki Tsang, FIEEE, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, WeiLun Professor of Electronic Engineering

Introduction

The Past

The Faculty of Engineering was established in 1991.   The first Dean, Prof. Omar Wing,  put in place the value system and collegial culture within the Faculty. From its beginning, the faculty has had a highly supportive collegial and collaborative culture, where even the newest and most junior lecturer was given funding, PhD students , laboratory space  and complete independence to establish a research group. Many of the values and principles established then, have remained in place to today: for example we place equal emphasis on the importance on teaching, research and service, and we have maintained the policy to recruit the best talent globally, avoiding research inbreeding from the recruitment of our own PhD graduates as professors unless they have gained substantial experience from outside CUHK.

Dr Charles Kao (Vice Chancellor 1987-96) also left a lasting influence to many of the young lecturers who were recruited for the new Faculty of Engineering in the 1990s. He invited all new lecturers, including myself, to visit his official residence in small groups for tea in 1993, and we had interesting conversations stimulating us to think about the wider significance of the problems we choose to address in our research.   Prof Kao had the wisdom to position the new Faculty of Engineering at CUHK to compete on equal footing in the “light engineering” disciplines of Computer sciences, information engineering, electronic engineering, and systems engineering. His strategy was to focus on the important emerging areas  of information networks (the internet had not yet become generally used in society in the late 1980s), microelectronics and biotechnology. By 1994 the Faculty of Engineering had added Mechanical Engineering (later renamed as Mechanical and Automation Engineering) as a department and grown to 75 academic staff including 5 Chair Professors, 5 Readers, 14 Senior Lecturers, 48 Lecturers and 3 Instructors.  Later the academic titles were changed to align with common usage in North America: lecturers were given the academic title of Assistant Professors or Associate Professors, and many of the Readers and Senior Lecturers were given the academic title of professors, and the instructors were eventually given the title of lecturers. With more than 6000 m² of space in the new Ho Sin Hang Engineering building there were ample space to grow from the approximately 75 professors, 250 research graduate students and 1300 undergraduate students in the early 1990s.  In 2001 the faculty had grown by 83% to 2379 students and the resultant lack of space led to the approval of a new building with net floor area of 5000 m² which was approved in 2001 and completed in 2004 as the William M Mong Engineering building. It was a much needed expansion because the faculty had grown from about 75 to 120 academic staff in 2004 and to about 400 research postgraduate students.

Fig.1  Shaw college EE graduation photos (1994/95) including the current Dean Prof Hon Ki Tsang (Front row: 1^st from left) founding Dean, Professor Omar Wing  (Front Row 5^th from left) and former Dean, Prof Pak Ching Ching (Front row, 2^nd from right).

The Present

The Faculty has further grown significantly in the 20 years since we moved into our second building. As of September 2024, we have 179 academic staff and about 1000 research postgraduate student population (more than double the population). Our undergraduate population also increased, to about 2600 students. The number of undergraduate programs offered by the Faculty of Engineering has tripled from the 4 programs offered in 1993 to the 13 different major programs offered in 2024. The Faculty of Engineering has remained in the same physical space in the last 20 years. Today, one of the main challenges limiting further growth in size of the faculty is the lack of space to expand: all departments in the Faculty of Engineering are struggling with insufficient laboratory and office space.  Although many of Engineering professors are leading their respective fields in research and have ranked among the most successful in Hong Kong in winning competitive research grant funding, we are also finding that the consequence of success – more research student and more facilities - is also placing an heavier strain on our finite space.   

Highlights of some of this year’s successes from CUHK Faculty of Engineering are the $85M Area of Excellence grant awarded to Prof Liu Yun Hui in Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The $40M RGC Strategic Topic Grant awarded to Prof Xing Guoliang from Department of Information Engineering,  and 6 Raise+ projects (each with up to $100M funding) awarded to the teams from Faculty of Engineering led by Professors Raymond Yeung (IE), Ni Zhao (EE), Hon Ki Tsang (EE), Samuel Au  (MAE), Liu Yunhui (MAE) and Prof Barbara Chan  (BME & School of Biomedical Sciences & ITERM).

Our professors this year also won major awards including the RGC Senior Research Fellowship  2024 being awarded to Prof Michael Lyu (CSE) and Prof Zhao Ni (EE), RGC Research Fellow 2024 award to  Prof. Yu Bei (CSE). Prof. Yu Bei also received the Design Automation Conference Under-40 Innovator Award for contributions in Machine Learning Driven Electronic Design Automation. Prof Lu Yi-Chun (MAE) was awarded the Tajima Prize 2024. Prof Ady Suwardi (EE) received the MIT Technology Review under-35 innovators award.  Prof Raymond Yeung (IE) was inducted into the US National Academy of Inventors 2023 while Prof Liao Wei-Hsin (MAE) won the 2023 Leonardo Da Vinci Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (the first such recipient from Hong Kong in its 45-year history.  However despite the excellent research performance, we face many challenges today including 1. Space: Despite growing by about 250% in terms of PhD student numbers and 50% in academic staff numbers we have not had any increase in space in 20 years. An additional building is urgently needed. Currently planning for a net floor area of 4650 m²  in the new building has been approved by the Education Panel in Legco but the final tender, budget and scope of works is yet to be approved by the Legco Public Works and Finance committees. If approved, the new building may be finished by the end of 2028. 2. Equipment and Infrastructure: Many of the research infrastructure is quite old, and in some cases (like our cleanroom facility) have been used for more than 20 years: WE will need to update and replace some of the old equipment. Hong Kong is also suffering from US export control restrictions, limiting access to the latest high-performance computers and GPUs for research in Artificial Intelligence, and high-speed communications test equipment; 3.Student intake quality and diversity is another major challenge: The declining population of STEM students in Hong Kong’s high schools and the relatively poor DSE admission scores (on average) for many of the engineering JUPAS programs in Hong Kong is an area for future improvement. One possible pathway is by expanding our recruitment of students to regions outside Hong Kong. The  government has changed the limit on  nonlocal students from 20% to 40%.

The Future

My long-term strategic goal and vision as Dean is to transform CUHK Faculty of Engineering to make it a truly world class faculty, comparable  with the best students and professors, and which can provide the best education experience for engineering in Hong Kong. This vision of becoming one of the best Engineering schools in the world will be a long marathon as we strive to improve ourselves in different domains. What makes a truly great engineering school? In my mind  there are at least five key factors, under the mnemonic PEARL as depicted in Fig 2:

Fig.2 Characteristics of a world class school. Red denote areas identified for improvement where, CUHK is not yet one of best.

Talented students are especially important in a great school. To improve student admissions, we need to further improve the on-campus education experience for our students, recruit students globally, and provide more opportunities for experiential learning by leveraging on our alumni networks to establish more internships.  It is also important to convince students of the benefit of participating in the different experiential learning opportunities on campus and we shall continue to support our students in competitions such as the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union’s  Robocon contest, which our students have won in recent years. To ensure relevance of our programs we need to engage with all stakeholders to ensure our education program serve the needs of the wider society. Our goal is to prepare students for worthwhile careers after graduation, and instill in them both the skills and desire for lifelong learning and make a lasting impact for their future growth.

We also need to support our talented professors in their efforts to pursue agenda-setting frontiers in research, and tackle the most significant problems facing the wider society.  Talent without the resources for research cannot easily thrive, and hence we also need to build a better research environment with updated research infrastructure and more research staff support. One metric where CUHK falls far behind the top universities like Cambridge University, is the number of postdoctoral fellows (relative to the number of undergraduate students or number of professors). In the last few years, the number of postdoctoral fellows in the Faculty of Engineering varied from 72 and 97, and the number of research associates was about 60 (some research associates did not yet have PhD). The total number of Research Associates/Postdocs is about 150,.  Using University of Cambridge as a benchmark,  CUHK has a worse metric in the Postdoctoral Fellow/Undergraduate ratio (CUHK  0.06 vs Cambridge 0.25)  or Postdoctoral Fellow: Teacher ratio (CUHK: 0.89 vs Cambridge 1.57). (based on data for Cambridge  from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Engineering,_University_of_Cambridge )

Our total block grant funding from UGC is barely sufficient to cover the cost of salaries of our current staff, and the running cost of the undergraduate programs. It does not provide any free cashflow for strategic development.  However, the Faculty also has self-financed MSc programs with current total enrollment of about 800 MSc students. Currently our self-financed MSc program revenues are less than a third of  that of our competitor in the University of Hong Kong, which currently has over 2700 MSc students. To remain competitive, we will need to gradually expand the enrollment in our MSc programs, both to attract and educate the  talents needed for the industries in the Greater Bay Area, and to build up sufficient free cashflow for strategic developments including the recruitment of new professors, and improving our research capacity by giving matching funding support to hire more postdocs, provide better support for our research postgraduate students, and to improve the learning environment and diversity in our undergraduate programs.   Looking to the future needs of Hong Kong, we can readily identify the need to strengthen the expertise in the Faculty in the areas of cross disciplinary applications of artificial intelligence (AI + X), financial technologies, semiconductors and related materials for improving computing in the post-Moore’s law era, and the use of advanced technologies to address the challenges for healthcare for the ageing population and the sustainable environment.