25 IN FOCUS PhD problem-solver who nds her own way s a female engineer, PhD student SU Dan (Class of , Electronic and Computer Engineering) has frequently had to forge her own path in relation to both her family and society’s expectations. However, the down-to-earth high achiever has persisted and shown her capabilities and self-motivation in settings ranging from the workplace and entrepreneurial world to academic team leadership. “Individual thoughts were something I have had since a young age. I didn’t really set long-term goals,” Dan said. “I always try to do things well and solve problems on the way.” In doing so, she said, opportunities came along “and I grasped them”. From her earliest years, Dan excelled academically, starting school in Shaanxi province in Mainland China a year early but still coming top of her class and winning awards in national mathematics competitions. Following her Computer Engineering program at the University of Science and Technology of China, where she basically had to start from scratch due to little prior exposure to computers, she gained a scholarship to join the School of Engineering (SENG)’s MPhil in Electronic and Computer Engineering in . She went on to publish three papers and participate in conferences overseas, all notable achievements for an MPhil student, as well as head the HKUST Mainland Students and Scholars Society. A er graduating in , Dan went on to join a bank, co-found a robotics company, and then work for SF Technology, an a liate of delivery giant SF Express. As the Senior Machine Learning and AI Engineer at SF, she was tasked with building a system to retrieve lost claims, a tough task that she solved through substantial research of her own in order to build machine learning algorithms. The conceptual model she produced became the solution, earning her several patents and adaptations of which are still being used by the company today. Despite her success there, Dan wanted to deepen her research knowledge further and in re-entered SENG to pursue a PhD. Just two weeks later, she led a team of PhD students and engineers from EMOS Technologies to the rst prize in the Chatbot Millionaire Challenge, organized by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. Recently, she also steered a HKUST Center for Arti cial Intelligence Research (CAiRE) team in the Kaggle COVID- Open Research Dataset Challenge (see P ). HKUST gained the highest score among over , global teams in one of set tasks. The University participants built their own machine learning-based system that rapidly generates ranked lists and paragraph-level summaries of over , scholarly articles about COVID- and related coronaviruses to facilitate the medical community in nding answers to queries. cont. P A Competitive edge: Su Dan led separate HKUST teams to success in two high-pro le contests in her rst 12 months as a PhD student.
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