29 IN FOCUS orean postgraduate Nayeon Lee, MPhil in Electronic and Computer Engineering, enjoyed an immensely fruitful learning and networking gathering as a selected participant in the Google Women Techmakers Scholars Program in Asia Paci c. The HKUST BEng in Computer Science and Engineering graduate, who is now exploring machine learning and arti cial intelligence under the supervision of Prof Pascale Fung, joined fellow high-flying female technology scholars from around the region and Google mentors on a six-day retreat in Seoul, Korea. The program involved a discussion on gender issues in the tech industry, a coding challenge, a panel discussion and sharing session by Googlers, and encouraged participants to network with each other. For Nayeon, the networking proved especially rewarding, being “motivational and inspirational to talk to people who were full of passion for technology”. Top and above: MPhil student Nayeon Lee found the Google Women Techmakers Scholars Program for Asia Paci c “inspirational”. Competition headliners Shaking up earthquake research A Civil and Environmental Engineering postgraduate team won the championship and two other awards at the Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools (IDEERS) Competition in Taiwan. The team received the top prize in the Postgraduate Division, Innovation Award of Seismic Isolation and Energy Dissipation and Best Presentation Award. The team comprised PhD students Srinivas Mogili, Michele De Filippo, Bence Kató and MPhil student Hoi Yin Yung. The students hailed from India, Italy, Hungary, and Hong Kong, with civil engineering specialties including structural, geotechnical and wind engineering, enabling multiple di erent areas of expertise and viewpoints to be incorporated into their building design. More than participants and teams in total competed in the contest’s high school, undergraduate and postgraduate divisions. Bright idea for solar panels Electronic and Computer Engineering postgraduate students took the championship at the rd GCL Cup International College Student Green Energy Science and Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition in Suzhou, China. PhD student Kwong Hoi Tsui and MPhil students Wing Yi Chak and Lei Tang pitched a business idea based on nanostructured antireflection lms for solar panels. They competed against teams from top universities in Mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan. The team members were previous winners of the HKUST One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition. Recovering scarce resource from sludge Civil and Environmental Engineering doctoral students Sen Lin, Weiqi Xue, Feixiang Zan and MPhil student Qian Zeng received the gold award at the TECO Green Tech International Contest in Taiwan for creating a technology that recovers an in-demand resource from sewage sludge. The School of Engineering innovation was awarded the top prize for enabling sulfated polysaccharides, a scarce pharmaceutical intermediate, to be recovered from sludge in an energy-e cient and novel way. The nal competition included teams from Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Russia and the US as well as Hong Kong. K Linking women tech high flyers
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