The School of Engineering (SENG) is pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. MOW Wai-Ho, Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), to succeed Prof. Philip MOK as the new Associate Dean of Engineering (Undergraduate Studies), with effect from September 1, 2021. Prof. Mow will work along with Prof. Albert CHUNG, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and another Associate Dean of Engineering (Undergraduate Studies), to oversee undergraduate matters in the School.

Prof. Mow obtained his BSc (Electronics) in 1989, MPhil and PhD (Information Engineering) in 1991 and 1993 respectively, all from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From 1997 to 1999, he was an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was also a recipient of the Croucher Research Fellowship (HK), Humboldt Research Fellowship (Germany), and Telecommunications Advancement Research Fellowship (Japan), among others, which supported him to be a visiting scholar at the University of Waterloo (1995), Munich University of Technology (1996), and Kyoto University (2000) respectively. He joined HKUST in 2000.

Over the years, he has provided dedicated service to the Department, the School and the University in various capacities. He has served as ECE Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Chair (2019-21), Computer Engineering Program Director (2012-14) and Associate Director (2010-12), Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee member (2012-14), SENG Accreditation Preparation Committee member (2013), etc.

Prof. Mow’s research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications, coding and information theory. He pioneered the lattice approach to signal detection problems (such as sphere decoding and complex lattice reduction-aided detection) and unified all known constructions of perfect roots-of-unity (or CAZAC) sequences that are widely used as preambles and radar signals. Since 2002, he has been the principal investigator of over 20 funded research projects. He has published one book, and co-authored over 30 US and Chinese patents as well as over 200 technical publications, among which he is the sole author of over 40.

His joint work received a number of awards, including 2016 & 2013 Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC) Best Paper Awards, 2014 HK-Taiwan IoT Academia Best Research Award, 2014 Hong Kong U-21 IoT Gold Award for IoT Revolutional Concept, and 2013 ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) Best Mobile App Award. A novel picture-embedding barcode, PiCode, developed by his research team was highlighted as one of Hong Kong’s four local innovations in the 2015 International IT Fest, organized by Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, Hong Kong.

Prof. Mow has been active in providing professional services to the international academic community. Over the years, he has served on the organizing committees of numerous conferences, such as the General Chair of 2018 International Conference on Sequences and Their Applications, and the Finance Chair of the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. He has also served as an editorial board member of several journals including IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2014-20) and Advances in Mathematics of Communications (2019-21).

The School would like to pay tribute and thank Prof. Philip Mok for his dedicated service and contributions as the Associate Dean of Engineering in the past three years. Under his leadership, the School has achieved important milestones in its undergraduate education, in particular the development of online teaching and learning under the pandemic situation.