Prof. LI Mo Honored with Huawei Spark Award for Solving Industry Technical Challenges
Prof. LI Mo, Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Low Altitude Economy Research Center at HKUST, was recognized with the Huawei Spark Award under Huawei’s Global Technical Challenges initiative. This marks the first such award received by an HKUST faculty member, representing an important milestone in the long-standing partnership between HKUST and Huawei.
The Huawei Spark Award was launched by Huawei in 2021 as part of the company’s Global Technical Challenges initiative, which aims to engage leading researchers worldwide in addressing challenging technical problems arising from real-world industrial needs. Since its launch, the initiative has attracted participation from nearly 10,000 experts and scholars globally, and more than 600 Spark Awards have been presented to professors and researchers from leading universities worldwide. Prof. Li Mo is the fifth researcher in Hong Kong to receive the award.
The Spark Award recognizes researchers whose ideas provide meaningful technical inspiration to Huawei and demonstrate clear potential to overcome critical barriers to practical deployment. Illustrating this impact, Prof. Li and his team have undertaken sustained technical efforts to address deterministic wireless communication in distributed collaborative scenarios within HarmonyOS. Their proposed solution successfully tackled key technical challenges and demonstrated strong potential for practical deployment and commercialization. The work received broad recognition from Huawei’s internal technical experts and ultimately earned him the Spark Award.
Prof. Hong K. LO, Dean of Engineering at HKUST, said, “We warmly congratulate Prof. Li Mo on receiving the Huawei Spark Award. This recognition highlights the value of research that connects academic innovation with real-world technological challenges, and reflects the strong culture of impactful research at the School of Engineering. We look forward to further strengthening our productive and engaging partnership with Huawei and fostering innovation together.”
Mr. JIANG Xiangzhong, President of Huawei 2012 Laboratories Asia Pacific Research Institute, said, “I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to Prof. Li Mo from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering on receiving the Huawei Spark Award. I also wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for its long-standing close collaboration with Huawei and for its strong support of the Huawei Global Technical Challenges initiative. The challenges proposed by Huawei are derived from real-world engineering practices and are both technically demanding and broad in scope. Faculty members who receive this award have demonstrated solid theoretical foundations, as well as a strong passion and resilience in addressing engineering problems.”
HKUST and Huawei have been collaborating for nearly 20 years. More than 90% of these collaborations have involved the School of Engineering.
Prof. Li Mo’s research interests cover wireless and mobile computing, smart city and urban data analytics, low altitude systems and communications, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). He received his PhD in Computer Science from HKUST in 2010 and joined his alma mater as a faculty member in 2023. Previously, he was a Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and IEEE Fellow. He currently serves as the Chair of the Executive Committee of ACM SIGMOBILE and editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Internet of Things.