Continued from P.8 I also had the opportunity to start the Human Language Technology Center with other faculty members. Our center was the first in Greater China to research speech recognition, machine translation and information retrieval. In addition, the center founded a number of startup companies that launched the world’s first Chinese natural language search engine, and the world’s first online translation engine, among others. I love my job and feel very lucky that I am being paid to realize my childhood dreams. Only engineers can get so many resources to build “toys” on a big scale. My overall goals are to improve people’s lives with our technology. To make such an impact, research is not enough. It is also necessary to develop products and market them. In 2011, I helped to found the Women Faculty Association at HKUST to enhance and improve diversity in terms of gender and cultural backgrounds. Other universities in Hong Kong are beginning to do the same this year. There are plenty of women who, given the opportunity, would be interested in engineering. Engineering is a good career for financial independence – a good engineer can always find a job anywhere in the world. Engineering also allows you to innovate, create, and make a direct positive impact on the societies of today and tomorrow. This they managed to do when they partnered with the Danish Environmental Protection Agency in tackling groundwater that had become polluted by chlorinated hydrocarbons at the Vapokon site on Fuen Island in Denmark. In Hong Kong, Prof Lo received Research Grants Council funding to assist the project mainly on the support of a PhD student to work in Denmark and conduct preliminary test and site monitoring work. The resulting full-scale fieldwork brought an immense amount of useful data for understanding the mechanism involved in permeable reactive barrier technology, publications in leading journals, and two major awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. “The breakthrough was learning how to set up a monitoring system to find out whether the pollutants in groundwater had been removed or not. The data showed they really were reduced. They were being treated and removed on site,” Prof Lo explained. In 2006, the research was extended to groundwater contaminated by chromium, arsenic and other toxic anionic pollutants. Closer to home, Prof Lo has carried out projects to clean up the Shing Mun River in Sha Tin and the Sham Chun River at the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The first involved a bioremediation technology and was carried out together with the Hong Kong government’s Civil Engineering and Development Department. The second trialed a soil/sediment washing technology for a joint study conducted by the Hong Kong and Shenzhen governments. “Every site is unique, depending on the pollutant and the nature of the soil, so you have to use different technologies to deal with it,” she noted. Currently, she is working with a private company over an environmentally friendly technology to clean up marine mud and reuse it on site. Such cutting-edge fieldwork has a useful impact on her teaching, another area to which she devotes much thought and effort and has brought University commendations. “When I apply my research on site, I use such information in my teaching,” Prof Lo said. “My students benefit a lot as they really see how it can be used. It is not just a concept anymore.” Prof Lo is keen to see more women become civil and environmental engineers and thinks high school students with an affinity for the three major sciences and a rational mindset will find the areas rewarding. “The word ‘civil’ in civil engineering stands for ‘civilization’”, she pointed out. A greater female presence could also bring new perspectives and vision. Other changes she is looking forward to include the valuable networking opportunities she foresees following her election to the Academy, an institution which focuses on developing knowledge, disseminating scientific information, and implementing major multinational projects. She is already noticing a stream of offers to speak at conferences and believes that the international connections that Academy membership can bring will create wider exposure for the School and HKUST. On her attainment of this standing, she remains modest, seeing the accolade not as personal achievement but simply as heartening evidence of the contribution she has been able to make to society. “My research students congratulated me and said it was a great honor,” she said. “To me, it is international recognition of my work over the past 20 years.” In Focus 14
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