News & Stories

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong Investment Corporation Limited (HKIC), and Gobi Partners (Gobi) today announced the launch of a new strategic fund focused on early-stage start-ups incubated at the University. The Gobi-Redbird Innovation Fund (Gobi-RIF) aims to propel university-born technologies into global markets, bridging cutting-edge academic discoveries with industry-driven scalability to deliver transformative solutions worldwide.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Sino Group successfully concluded the Hong Kong finale of the "HKUST-SINO One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition 2025" today at the HKUST Clear Water Bay campus. Celebrating its 15th anniversary, the competition this year attracted 348 teams from around the world to compete for awards and exchange innovative ideas to develop practical solutions for a sustainable future. The team Stellerus Technology Limited claimed the top Platinum Award for their Feilian Constellation.The award presentation ceremony was officiated by Deputy Chief Executive Officer Mr. David NG from Sino Group, with HKUST President Prof. Nancy IP and HKUST Vice-President for Research and Development Prof. Tim CHENG in attendance. Finalist teams presented their pioneering projects to a distinguished audience of industry partners, investors, and academic leaders.

How will our collective future take shape? Our students may have the answer. To empower global citizens to build a safer, more resilient world, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) joins hands with Stanford University as a founding partner to launch the Global Sustainability Challenge.This competition represents a powerful collaboration between sustainability and education experts.  By pooling experience and expertise, the competition was shaped by founding partners from prestigious institutions as founding universities, such as Imperial College London, Zhejiang University, Technical University of Munich, and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Invest Hong Kong (InvestHK) is pleased to announce today (September 12) the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and a consortium of French companies, including Schneider Electric, Veolia, Bouygues-Dragages, Egis, and Saint-Gobain. This partnership will launch a pioneering low carbon retrofit pilot project, marking a pivotal step toward achieving Hong Kong's carbon neutrality goal by 2050, a goal shared by France.  This MOU stems from the Team France Green Paper on collaboration opportunities to accelerate Hong Kong's path to carbon neutrality by 2050 published in April 2024. This was followed by work on a pilot project proposal for a net zero-carbon building, which was shared with the Chief Executive, Mr. John LEE.

A research team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), led by Professors Gan Jianping (Department of Ocean Science) and Professor Yang Can (Department of Mathematics), has developed a novel AI-powered tool named STIMP for diagnosing coastal ocean productivity and ecosystem health. STIMP introduces a novel paradigm that imputes missing data and then predicts Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations across large spatiotemporal scales. In tests across four representative global coastal regions, STIMP significantly outperformed existing geoscience tools, reducing the mean absolute error (MAE) for imputation by up to 81.39% and for prediction by 58.99%. Accurate Chl-a prediction aids in early detection of harmful algal blooms, ecosystem protection, and provides data-driven insights for evidence-based policy-making.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) selected eight cutting-edge projects for the latest round of Sustainable Smart Campus as a Living Lab program for testing on campus. Covering a wide range of sustainability challenges on campus, the projects address energy efficiency, renewable energy optimization, water management, wellness, ecosystem enhancement, and predictive maintenance strategies, providing students and faculty with hands-on experience with prototypes before real-world implementation.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) today announced the launch of “Aivilization”, the largest-scale AI multi-agent social simulation sandbox to date. This innovative platform studies how human interaction with AI can shape a virtual society, where ‘AI inhabitants’ can organically develop their own governance structures, economies and cultural norms.   As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, understanding the dynamics of communication between humans and artificial intelligence has become a crucial area of study. Previous simulation models like Project Sid1 and Stanford Smallville2 have explored similar themes, with community sizes of around 1,000 and dozens of AI agents respectively, to observe the evolution of AI civilizations.

Prof. CHEN Fei, Associate Head and Professor of the Division of Environment and Sustainability at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has received the prestigious 2025 Luke Howard Award from the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC). As the second scholar from the Greater China to receive this global accolade, this recognition honors his exceptional leadership and transformative contributions to urban climatology. As the top award from IAUC, the Luke Howard Award is presented annually to recognize outstanding contributions to the urban climatology field in terms of a combination of research, teaching, and service to the international community of urban climatologists.  The IAUC commended Prof. Chen for his international leadership and impact in urban climate modelling, highlighting his role in shaping policies and developing tools that protect vulnerable urban areas.