19 IN FOCUS to Excellence Moreover, faced with the large-scale resources that stand behind institutions in Japan, Korea, and Mainland China, and their large job markets to absorb graduates, Hong Kong’s truly international, English-speaking, and culturally diverse society is one of its outstanding competitive advantages in attracting global talent. Where do you get your own passion for engineering? My father was a civil engineer, my two sons are engineers, so it runs in our family. From childhood, I have loved maths and physics and since elementary school becoming an engineer was never in doubt. My father was the chief engineer for the landmark Penghu Great Bridge in Taiwan. We were all proud of this but it meant he was away from home for eight years. That’s why I decided to choose a di erent eld. Initially, I focused on electronic and computer engineering, working on semiconductors. I worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for ve years, before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I set up the System-on-Chip (SoC) Design and Test Lab. In the late s, I established my second lab, the Learning-Based Multimedia Lab, focused on mobile computer vision, and served as the University’s Founding Director of the Computer Engineering Program. Right now, I am : involved with electronic and computer engineering and computer science and engineering. How will you seek to build the faculty team? Academics are the key to all institutional excellence in education and research. Thus, I place high priority on recruitment, retention and development. An outstanding faculty team will in turn inspire other top academics to join the School and can attract the best students. Developing and maintaining a highly intellectual environment is crucial for recruitment and retention of talents. Marketing the School, advocating the impact of faculty research and education results, and developing resources are all part of such development. Partnerships with other top-tier global institutions will also be important to broaden reach and resources and re up creativity. How do you view the relationship between fundamental and applied research in today’s innovation-focused world? A strong engineering school must maintain a portfolio of long-term fundamental research, preserve its core scienti c strengths and support curiosity-driven projects. These are crucial elements and without them the pipeline for scienti c discoveries and translating them into engineering capabilities will essentially be broken. Thus, engineering research cannot simply be driven by societal challenges and applications. The balance between applied and fundamental research must be maintained. What are your goals in education? The quality of an institution’s primary product – students – de nes the institution. Our postgraduate recruitment is worldwide and, given the School and University’s global reputation for research, is doing really well. Undergraduates are mainly local, in line with HKUST’s mission to assist Hong Kong’s development, and we need to work harder with sister institutions and the government to alter the cultural climate in the city and move engineering, technology, and innovation from second and third choice to the frontline for young people and their families. In addition, the School’s serious commitment to teaching innovation, such as e-learning, blended learning and hands-on education, must continue to help our students acquire the skills that will enable them to prosper over the long term. Given the accelerated pace of technology advances and shrinking lifecycle of an individual engineer’s knowledge, it is unlikely that graduates today will work for decades for a single company, or even in a single eld. This means students must have the ability to learn independently and think about what to learn; a well-rounded view of engineering and life; and the passion to continue to evolve. How will you build bonds with alumni and industry? Developing strong links with industry in Hong Kong, Mainland China and globally, and engaging alumni are critically important for the School’s development. The most important avenue for gaining such support is to excite alumni and industry about the research agenda of our faculty, our students and the development of next-generation leaders, and the positive di erences we are making to society. Why is there such an emphasis on diversity these days? I strongly believe that diversity is one of the most important elements in innovation and a key ingredient for excellence. When people come from di erent elds, training, backgrounds, and have di erent rst languages, their brains are wired in di erent ways. If you put them together and they start communicating, new ideas are formed.
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