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Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Video
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Video
In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.
Event date: 13/5/2022
Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Language and Languages and Chinese Language
- Keywords:
- History China Written communication Chinese characters Chinese language -- Written Chinese East Asia
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Focusing on tensions and links between national formation and international outlooks, this talk shows how classical world visions persist as China’s modernizers and revolutionaries adopted and revised the Western nation-state and cosmopolitanism. The concepts of tianxia (all under heaven) and datong (great harmony) have been updated into outlooks of global harmony that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as strategies of overcoming interstate conflict, national divides, and social fragmentation. The talk will delve into two debates: the embrace of the West vs. aspirations for a common world, and the difference between liberal cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism.
Event date: 16/9/2022
Speaker: Prof. Ban Wang
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Chinese Studies
- Keywords:
- Diplomatic relations World politics China Civilization
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the relaxation of the Ming sea ban, along with the arrival of the Europeans, generated a multipolar environment in East Asia. It revolved around the intra-Asian exchange centered upon Chinese silk and Japanese silver, and a nascent global flow of New World bullion to China and spices for Western Europe. The situation changed during the mid-seventeenth century amid mounting restrictions on overseas contacts from the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan and the consolidation and militarization of Chinese merchants under the Zheng family. By 1683, when the Qing forced the Zheng to surrender and occupied their bastion of Taiwan, China had achieved naval preeminence in the East Asian sea lanes. Other than a few outposts, the Europeans had largely withdrawn from the area north of island Southeast Asia, which remained under the hegemony of the Dutch East India Company. In 1684, the Qing court legalized private trade and travel abroad, prompting another wave of overseas migration. Authorities in China and across eastern maritime Asia enacted policies that kept the Qing merchants and immigrants separate from the earlier Ming loyalists. Additionally, both groups of Chinese were accorded significant political, economic, and legal privileges. This infrastructure, backed by Qing naval power, paved the way for the “Chinese century” in maritime Asia.
Event date: 09/11/2022
Speaker: Dr. Xing Hang
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong
- Subjects:
- Area Studies and Chinese Studies
- Keywords:
- Chinese diaspora Chinese Qing Dynasty (China) Southeast Asia
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
In this lecture, Prof. Sifakis will discuss the relevance of existing criteria for comparing human and machine intelligence and show some notable analogies and differences between scientific knowledge and that produced by neural networks. Emphasising that autonomy is an important step towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), he will present a characterisation of autonomous systems, and showing key differences with mental systems equipped with common sense knowledge and reasoning, and advocate challenging work directions, including the development of a new foundation for systems engineering and scientific knowledge, and the joint exploration of physical and mental phenomena that embody human intelligence.
Event date: 3/3/2023
Speaker: Prof. Joseph Sifakis
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Subjects:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Keywords:
- Artificial intelligence
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This study takes Klook, a Hong Kong-based technological online travel company, as a successful example of how to use a Mobile-first strategy and Celebrity Charm Strategy to provide customers with a unique and comprehensive travel products and services platform.
- Subjects:
- Marketing and Hotel, Travel and Tourism
- Keywords:
- Travel -- Computer network resources Tourism -- Marketing Marketing
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Professor Yigong Shi will reflect on the challenges in global higher education, based on his 37 years of learning, scientific research, and teaching experience in academia. He will present Westlake University's educational reforms in university operations, governance, talent recruitment, student development, research and academic evaluation, and interdisciplinary studies, which altogether provide new opportunities for future-oriented higher education.
Event date: 06/12/2022
Speaker: Prof. Yigong Shi
Moderator: Prof. Qingyan Chen (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Keywords:
- Educational change China Education Higher
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Before the advent of computers around 1950, optimization centered either on small-dimensional problems solved by looking at zeroes of first derivatives and signs of second derivatives, or on infinite-dimensional problems about curves and surfaces. In both cases, "variations" were employed to understand how a local solution might be characterized. Computers changed the picture by opening the possibility of solving large-scale problems involving inequalities, instead of only equations. Inequalities had to be recognized as important because the decisions to be optimized were constrained by the need to respect many upper or lower bounds on their feasibility. A new kind of mathematical analysis, beyond traditional calculus, had to be developed to address these needs. It built first on appealing to the convexity of sets and functions, but went on to amazingly broad and successful concepts of variational geometry, subgradients, subderivatives, and variational convergence beyond just that. This talk will explain these revolutionary developments and why there were essential.
Event date: 1/11/2022
Speaker: Prof. Terry Rockafellar (University of Washington)
Hosted by: Department of Applied Mathematics
- Subjects:
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Keywords:
- Convex functions Convex sets Mathematical optimization Computer science -- Mathematics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Geospatial information science is a discipline that focuses on using geospatial information technology to understand people, places, nature and processes of the earth. IoT refers to Internet of things, the combination of sensors, software and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. The era of IoT brings us opportunities and challenges for geospatial information science. In the keynote, five characteristics and three scientific issues of geo-spatial information science in the era of IoT are summarised.
Event date: 06/09/2022
Speaker: Prof. Daren Li
Moderator: Prof. Christopher Chao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Panel members: Prof. Qingyan Chen, Prof. Qinhao Chen (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Subjects:
- Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics
- Keywords:
- Internet of things Geospatial data Spatial data mining
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Adaptive computation is of great importance in numerical simulations. The ideas for adaptive computations can be dated back to adaptive finite element methods in 1970s. In this talk, we shall first review some recent development for adaptive methods with some application. Then, we will propose a deep adaptive sampling method for solving PDEs where deep neural networks are utilized to approximate the solutions. In particular, we propose the failure informed PINNs (FI-PINNs), which can adaptively refine the training set with the goal of reducing the failure probability. Compared with the neural network approximation obtained with uniformly distributed collocation points, the proposed algorithms can significantly improve the accuracy, especially for low regularity and high-dimensional problems.
Event date: 18/10/2022
Speaker: Prof. Tao Tang (Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College)
Hosted by: Department of Applied Mathematics
- Subjects:
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Keywords:
- Sampling (Statistics) Differential equations Partial -- Numerical solutions Mathematical models Adaptive computing systems
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Convex Matrix Optimization (MOP) arises in a wide variety of applications. The last three decades have seen dramatic advances in the theory and practice of matrix optimization because of its extremely powerful modeling capability. In particular, semidefinite programming (SP) and its generalizations have been widely used to model problems in applications such as combinatorial and polynomial optimization, covariance matrix estimation, matrix completion and sensor network localization. The first part of the talk will describe the primal-dual interior-point methods (IPMs) implemented in SDPT3 for solving medium scale SP, followed by inexact IPMs (with linear systems solved by iterative solvers) for large scale SDP and discussions on their inherent limitations. The second part will present algorithmic advances for solving large scale SDP based on the proximal-point or augmented Lagrangian framework In particular, we describe the design and implementation of an augmented Lagrangian based method (called SDPNAL+) for solving SDP problems with large number of linear constraints. The last part of the talk will focus on recent advances on using a combination of local search methods and convex lifting to solve low-rank factorization models of SP problems.
Event date: 11/10/2022
Speaker: Prof. Kim-Chuan Toh (National University of Singapore)
Hosted by: Department of Applied Mathematics
- Subjects:
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Keywords:
- Convex programming Semidefinite programming
- Resource Type:
- Video