Innovative Information and Communications Technology solutions led or developed by the professors of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have received the Hong Kong ICT Awards 2020 in their respective category, namely Smart People (Smart Education and Learning) Award, Smart Living Award (Smart Healthcare) and FinTech (Regulatory Technology and Risk Management) Award.
CUHK currently has more than 1,000 granted patents in different jurisdictions worldwide. Some of these patents have been licensed to relevant industries that help bring these innovations to the market to benefit society. In academic year 2019-20, CUHK has received 257 granted patents and filed 386 patent applications for inventions developed in the areas of medical technology, biotechnology, information technology, telecommunications, and materials science.
Smart People (Smart Education and Learning) Award – Silver Award
Winner: Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, The Department of Linguistics and Modern Language, CUHK
Project: “Speak Along”
Description: “Speak Along” is a one-stop service model which includes an online knowledge platform, gamified mobile applications, seminar and workshop series for parents, direct speech therapy sessions and volunteer services, catering to the needs of pre- and primary-school underprivileged children with language disorders and providing them with free speech training sessions. More than 13,000 parents have already benefitted from this project.
“Speak Along” launched its interactive mobile app in 2018, offering entertaining and interactive animations that provide simple screening and diagnosis, as well as training in speech perception and production, vocabulary and grammar learning, listening and storytelling skills. The app also incorporates fundamental concepts about linguistics and language pathology, as well as useful tips for parents to support their children to improve their language ability systematically on a daily basis.
Smart Living (Smart Healthcare) Award – Certificate of Merit
Winner: Imsight Technology Co., Ltd. (a startup founded by Professor Heng Pheng Ann, Professor, and Chen Hao, PhD graduate of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at CUHK)
Project: DR-Sight
Description: DR-Sight identifies 19 pulmonary lesions from X-ray images, such as pneumothorax, fibrosis, nodules and more. The system can act as a second reader, quickly screen for signs, identify locations of lesions, and automatically generate structured reports. Moreover, it comes with triage function in which critical cases can be flagged up for earlier attention. Other than radiologists, subordinates can also make use of DR-Sight to revise the case order according to predicted risk level and pass it to radiologists for their final decision. This ultimately optimise radiologists’ workflow and increases overall productivity.
FinTech (Regulatory Technology and Risk Management) Award – Certificate of Merit
Winner: Datago Technology Ltd. (a startup founded by Professor Zhang Tianyu, Professor, and Long Yi, former postdoctoral research fellow of the School of Accountancy, Faculty of Business Administration at CUHK)
Project: Text Analytics Platform for Chinese Capital Market
Description: Datago aims to leverage big data and artificial intelligence technologies to mine quantitative and easy-to-use structured data from large scale text data that is related to the capital market in mainland China and Hong Kong, such as news, reports and social media posts. Based on the accurate and real-time quantitative financial data analytics service provided by Datago, Datago’s clients can easily and systematically incorporate public information in their working flow of developing trading strategies and risk management, in order to improve returns and reduce risk. Datago’s clients, including several leading hedge funds and top universities like Tsinghua University, Peking University and University of Toronto.
