3 IN FOCUS As a believer that discovery often happens by accident rather than design, Prof Lau keenly pursues curiosity-driven research. A health sensor embedded in your body that is talking to your phone, which is in touch with a health database in order to monitor your condition. The integration of control and communication technology to create intelligent vehicles that can drive themselves as well as talk to each other, enabling smoother traffic flow and eliminating the need for traffic lights. This is the potential world of fifth-generation wireless systems that innovative academics such as Prof Vincent Kin Nang Lau, Electronic and Computer Engineering, are helping to drive forward. As communication technology moves on from human-to-human interaction (phone calls) and human to machine (emails, downloading videos), such machine-to-machine applications are set to emerge, according to the School of Engineering professor who has contributed to a host of advances in nextgeneration wireless communication basic research and technologies. Ongoing curiosity about the area has led Prof Lau to spend more than 15 years exploring and driving knowledge forward, publishing over 200 papers. “Wireless communication is now a very big field with many components. You can use your mobile phone to watch videos, browse the internet, as well as make calls, requiring many enabling technologies to make this possible and to create low-cost, reliable and high-quality systems. The work I do seeks to address different challenges, including better coverage, expanded capacity, and changing use of mobile phones.” Prof Lau’s journey into this high-impact field stemmed from an early interest in fixing his toys and machines as a child. It was practical experiences such as these that saw him become an electronic engineering undergraduate rather than follow his other strong interests in physics and math. “I still remember that when I was a Secondary Three student, I was able to repair my brother’s company fax machine and how happy this made me feel,” he said. Two main passions since university days have been communications theory and control theory, which he enjoys for the “beauty” of the concepts behind them. “Communication theory deals with how you deliver information from point to point efficiently, such as wireless communication. Control theory is concerned with how to adjust speed and angle with the precision required to hit a target or launch a spaceship into orbit. These are two different problems but, at an early stage, I felt they were connected at the detailed mathematical level and I’ve remained very curious about that. Even now I’m always thinking about how these two theories can be related.” Following graduation, Prof Lau worked as a system engineer in the fixed-line network area at Hong Kong Telecom (now PCCW) for three years before heading overseas to fulfill his twin objectives of further study and seeing the world. In 1995, he started a PhD at the University of Cambridge, receiving Prof Vincent Kin Nang Lau’s cutting-edge research on wireless communication and related technologies is helping to reshape the way we communicate with other people and our relationship with machines
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