Professor Tsang Hon Ki and Professor Irwin King Kuo Chin, Faculty of Engineering have been elected Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the class of 2019, for their research contributions to "nonlinear silicon photonics and advanced waveguide grating couplers" and the "theory and applications of machine learning in social computing". There are currently 32 IEEE Fellows among 110 professors in the Faculty of Engineering at CUHK.

Professor Tsang Hon Ki is currently the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Engineering and Professor of the Department of Electronic Engineering. He received BA. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 1987 and 1991 respectively. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Bath, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, CUHK, in 1993 and served as the Department Chairman in 2010-2016.

He is well known for his research contributions to nonlinear silicon photonics and advanced waveguide grating couplers. He joined the development of the first silicon photonic integrated circuits for commercial telecommunication networks and was among the handful of early researchers to work in the nascent field of silicon photonics in the 1990s. Since then, the research community in silicon photonics has grown tremendously. Silicon photonics has become one of the mainstream technologies for high-speed energy-efficient communications used in data centres and is a key technology enabling data centres to support the continued growth of data traffic in the internet. Silicon photonics chips are also finding new applications in light detection and ranging (LIDAR) for autonomous cars, gas sensors, artificial neural networks (artificial intelligence hardware), secure quantum communications and quantum computing.

Professor Tsang has co-authored about 400 refereed journal and conference papers. He is a recipient of the CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Outstanding Researcher Award 2007, Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Engineering, the Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Award in Natural Sciences (second class) 2014 from the Ministry of Education of China, and was elected Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2018.

Professor Tsang stated, "The legacy of Prof. Sir Charles Kao in advancing the state of the art for optical communications is very much alive in CUHK today. His determination on scientific research has made a great impact on me and my colleagues. And I feel greatly honoured that our research on silicon photonics at CUHK has been recognised by our professional peers. This year, only 13 IEEE Fellows were elected from the IEEE Photonics Society (IPS), and I was very humbled and honoured when I found out that I was the only IPS member singled out for elevation to Fellow from the Asia region, particularly as mainland China, Taiwan and Japan have many optical scientists working on lasers, fiber optic communications and optical sensors."

Professor Irwin King Kuo Chin is currently Associate Dean (Education) of the Faculty of Engineering and Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK. He received his B.Sc. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He also worked at the AT&T Labs Research on Big Data and taught courses as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkley during his sabbatical.

Professor King has been dedicated to research in machine learning, social computing, web intelligence, data mining, and multimedia information processing. In these areas, he has contributed over 300 technical papers in top international journals, 30 book chapters and edited volumes, and served as an editorial member for a number of international journals. Prof. King also owns six international patents, including the VeriGuide System. It is plagiarism detection software which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of text-based documents in both English and in Chinese to promote academic integrity and honesty.

In recent years, he has actively promoted e-learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With funding support from the University Grants Committee, he launched an eLearning platform KEEP (Knowledge & Education Exchange Platform), developed and initiated by CUHK with all partner institutions, as a project investigator. KEEP aims to offer a personalised educational portal for users to easily search, subscribe and access content related to education from the platform. It supports the development of innovative teaching and learning with cutting-edge technology and it uncovers the most relevant results from different education resources.

The IEEE is the world's largest professional organisation dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity, with more than 430,000 members in over 160 countries. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and the total number of recipients each year does not exceed 0.1% of the total voting IEEE membership. It is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement. 296 members of IEEE were elevated to Fellow this year.