New Associate Dean Prof. MOW Wai-Ho Encourages Students to Seek Opportunities and Broaden Horizons

Prof. Mow Wai-Ho constantly reminds himself to put students first. [Download Photo]

Being in a dark room, he stretched out his arms and explored with his fingers to reach for the light switch, the location of which he had no idea about. After numerous unsuccessful trials, sometimes hitting upon the walls, he finally found it and switched it on. And, there was light.

This was how Prof. MOW Wai-Ho described the Eureka moment he enjoyed most when discovering truths to intellectual questions.

The new Associate Dean of Engineering (Undergraduate Studies) recalled such magical moments with great delight. Back in his high school days, he was most impressed as he saw with wonder science teachers cracking complex text-based problems, solving them with mathematical equations and formulae, and finally coming up with clear-cut, profound, and yet concise solutions.

Now an engineering scholar, Prof. Mow has had the philosophical mindset to seek answers and truths since a young age. At age seven, upon the early passing of his father, he witnessed the hardships and miseries of his mother and elder siblings who bore the family burden and made ends meet. The family’s financial and emotional strains drove the young Mow to resort to books and philosophy to seek answers and comfort. Intrigued by theories and excelling in mathematics and physics during high school, he was also attracted to applications owing to the influence of his elder brother who decomposed and recomposed radios to learn about electronics as an amateur.

Completing PhD in two years

Engineering was a practical goal due to its clear career paths as well. With scholarships, Prof. Mow started pursuing Electronics as major and Computer Science as minor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in the late 1980s. During MPhil studies in the same university when he specialized in sequence detection, he designed an algorithm even simpler than the Viterbi algorithm, named after the Qualcomm founder, and it pleasantly surprised his supervisor Prof. C. P. KWONG, who was himself the first PhD student of the famous scientist and writer Prof. CHEN Chih-Fan. His PhD supervisor at CUHK is Prof. Robert S. Y. LI, who is a renowned scholar and is well-known as the “Father of Network Coding”. Completing his PhD at super high speed within merely two years, Prof. Mow won the Best PhD Thesis in Engineering Award and the Young Scholar Dissertation Award in 1993, and published a book accordingly about sequence design.

The locally-bred scholar officially went abroad for the first time when the Croucher Research Fellowship and the Humboldt Research Fellowship took him to Canada’s University of Waterloo and Germany’s Technische Universität München (TUM) for a couple of years during his late twenties and early thirties.

“I wasn’t even confident with my oral English during PhD defense, and yet shortly after, I had the opportunity to see the world. Waterloo’s professors, being academic and theoretical, were superb at explicating complex concepts in simple ways. Germany, with strong links between academia and industry, had its own industrial models be it doorknobs or ashtrays, not to mention advanced technologies to solve practical problems.”

As an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University during early career, he gained exposure to the city-state’s multiculturalism, its top-down technological development led by government officials who were technocrats themselves, as well as hands-on nurturing of and close contacts with undergraduate students.

A new generation of award-winning barcodes

Prof. Mow returned to Hong Kong to join HKUST’s Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 2000, taking full advantage of its foci on education and research, as well as its academic freedom. Leveraging his expertise in coding and information theory, he joined the University’s world-acclaimed scientists in wireless communications to solve a variety of engineering problems and make an impact in the real world.

Throughout his research career, his achievements included pioneering the lattice approach to signal detection problems, and unifying all known constructions of perfect roots-of-unity (or CAZAC) sequences that are widely used as preambles and radar signals.

In recent years, he and his HKUST barcode group developed picture-embedded proprietary codes (PiCodes) and video-embedded proprietary codes (ViCodes), a new generation of barcodes that use images and videos instead of conventional black-and-white lines and blocks. The inventions, mainly involving cameras, displays and mobile applications, boast the advantages of enhanced security, storage capacity and aesthetic appearance. Providing access even without internet connections, they will enable existing display devices in shopping malls to convey information to customers much more effectively and, more notably, without the need to make infrastructural or hardware changes. Being customer-oriented and with high commercial values, the inventions are quick to reap awards and gain recognitions, such as being 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.

Having been the principal investigator of over 20 funded research projects, he had co-authored more than 30 US and Chinese patents and over 200 technical publications, among which he was the sole author of more than 40.

Revert always

The engineer, with appreciation for insights, finds wisdom in investor Charlie MUNGER’s saying: “Revert, always revert”. Prof. Mow explicated, “In the pathway of solving a problem for instance, one starts from point A and tries to reach point B. Whereas most people would stop once they reach point B, it is in fact important to go back to point A now that they know what is in-between. By reverting between points A and B many times, one would ultimately be able to find the shortest and most effective path. Grasping the gist of it, one can find best solutions and create knowledge.”

Prof. Mow used foreign travels as a metaphor. “If you joined a package tour with tight schedules, you would learn very little about foreign culture. If you found the routes and went back by your own means on the other hand, you would benefit a lot more.”

Formerly launching his research career in coding during postgraduate studies, then joining HKUST’s wireless team, and in recent years once again perfecting his coding research, Prof. Mow himself is the best example of always reverting to achieve new heights.

Seek eye-opening experiences and do not over-optimize

Sharing his own past as a young student with humble beginnings and little overseas experience then, the new Associate Dean encourages HKUST students to take advantage of internships, exchange opportunities and experiential learning to broaden their horizons step by step.

“The opportunities are there, but some students may not fully leverage them due to lack of confidence or proactivity.” He likened personal development with outstanding chefs preparing great meals. “The richer the ingredients, the better the dish one prepares. The more eye-opening experiences you seek, the more capable you will become in managing the ever-changing scenarios in life.”

Whereas back-to-back meetings and policy-making processes might seem mundane to some, Prof. Mow always reminds himself to think of the needs of students. “Those are not only policies; they have consequences that affect students. I constantly remind myself to see things from students’ perspectives. When there were students on probation for instance, I would try to show my care for them and learn if they were undergoing emotional, financial, or other hardships that affected their performance,” said the scholar who had served as ECE Final Year Project Coordinator, ECE Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Chair, Computer Engineering Program Director, and Engineering Undergraduate Studies Committee member.

Prof. Mow, finding that most Hong Kong students and parents are eager to seek return on investment, sees the pros and cons in their pragmatic approach. “Disciplines that are hot today may no longer have high demands when students graduate. If they over-optimize based on current situations, they may miss out unforeseen opportunities that only appear in future. In view of the fast-changing world, they should instead build robust fundamental skills, both soft and hard ones, that are always needed.”

He is particularly glad whenever he successfully contributes to local students’ decisions to pursue postgraduate studies as well as venture into start-ups. Most recently, he had supervised local undergraduate and postgraduate students to develop a cloud-based temperature sensing system, using low-cost thermal and RGB image sensors and machine learning algorithms, that became widely used during COVID-19 pandemic. With the invention, the start-up team Thermal Plus was awarded the HKSTP pre-incubation STEP fund and the HKUST Entrepreneurship Acceleration Fund. The team then evolved into the start-up company Intelligent Design Technology that had attracted investments. Prior to that, other postgraduate students he supervised had won a number of best paper awards and other recognitions.

Philosophy-minded scientist

In life, there are a few principles and mottos to which he adheres. One of them is reasoning from first principles, that is to reduce a complicated problem into a set of questions with fewer assumptions and reduce further and further until a set of tractable questions with minimal assumptions are obtained, and then reassembling them from the ground up to formulate an abstract generalized problem with tractable solutions. By so doing, Prof. Mow believes one can find questions and answers afresh, and no longer needs to follow the flow.

Prof. Mow is also into the sayings of Albert EINSTEIN, whom he refers to as a philosophy-based physicist who thought deeply and dared to make suggestions contrary to popular beliefs. Einstein was convinced that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” (note: “simpler” means “oversimplified”). To Prof. Mow, finding profound and yet concise answers, that is achieving conceptual simplification, is equivalent to Eureka moments of finding light switches in a dark room.

Thus his advice to students: “Seek opportunities one step at a time to widen your exposure; they will take you much further.” He continued, “Learn the fundamentals, go through first principles. Try to find the most profound but simple solutions. Revert and revert to find the best one.”