Cover Story 18 IN FOCUS Prof. Chen Kai and his plans for Hong Kong’s AI computing cloud platform. He has already seen system designs adopted by Google, Huawei, and Nvidia. Prof. Chen and his intelligent System Networking (iSING) laboratory researchers at the School of Engineering (SENG) are also seeking to address privacy concerns related to transfer and sharing of data. “Firstly, there is high performance so we can handle big data within short time frames, o en reducing work duration from weeks to days or even hours for large AI model training,” Prof. Chen said. “Secondly, there is privacy preservation as we use encryption to enable technologies that can learn from data and do so without disclosing identities in relation to the data.” In the case of medical data, for example, individual hospitals need to protect information related to their own patients. However, the medical community as a whole needs to combine data from di erent hospitals to enlarge sample sizes for research. To address hospitals’ concerns, Prof. Chen and his team will deploy advanced encryption technologies so that data can be combined to establish models for collective learning and disease diagnoses. Most importantly, the actual data will never leave individual hospitals, which he sees as a great step forward in privacy preservation. The same principle can be applied to nancial services across banks. Currently, though, he and his team are working with the Transport Department and Hong Kong Observatory with the aim of optimizing Hong Kong’s transportation system. His team has collected massive spatial-temporal graph-based city data, which can be leveraged by deep neural networks, such as graph convolutional networks to build powerful models for di erent smart applications. High-performance career In addition to his own research lab, Prof. Chen Kai is advancing the networking and high-performance AI computing eld as: Director, WeChat-HKUST Joint Lab on Arti cial Intelligence Technology (WHAT Lab) Executive Vice-President, Hong Kong Society of Arti cial Intelligence & Robotics Chair of the Steering Committee, Asia-Paci c Workshop on Networking Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Co-founder of Clustar, together with departmental colleague Prof. YANG Qiang. The company is focused on big data and AI solutions, and has received funding support from Sequoia Capital.
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