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Geospatial data finds applications in a wide array of fields, including urban planning, environmental management, disaster response, and transportation, leveraging spatial patterns to support decision-making in various sectors. Nevertheless, errors, imprecision, and complexities in datasets containing information about space and/or time can undermine the quality and reliability of spatial data and analyses. This issue of uncertainty in geospatial science (GIS) is expected to intensify as AI-driven geospatial applications become increasingly widespread, according to Prof. Michael GOODCHILD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

On 1 August 2025 (Friday), Prof. Goodchild gave the 42nd PAIR Distinguished Lecture on the topic of “Geospatial Futures”. Joined by 76 in-person participants and an online audience of 15,310, the Lecture reviewed the key developments and legacy practices in the evolution of GIS, revealing the forthcoming directions and future prospects in the field. In the Lecture, Prof. Goodchild briefly introduced the history of GIS, discussing how innovations in areas including measurements, naming conventions, computing, global positioning system (GPS) and locating-measuring technologies have combined to propel the development of GIS.

According to Prof. Goodchild, the explosion of data and diffusion of advanced technologies, including machine learning, generative AI and digital twins in the modern era, would present multiple new technical problems to GIScience, including geographic bias, transparency of machine learning, environmental cost, and uncertainty in predictions, challenging the fitness-for-use of geographic systems built. In the Lecture, he emphasised a new direction for GIS: the achievement of more powerful and cheaper computation for finer-resolution data, better models, machine learning and 3D photorealism. In illustrating the importance of computational breakthroughs for GIS, he shared several compelling examples of digital twin models that give virtual representations of physical landscapes such as volcanoes, coastal regions and urban environments. In closing his presentation, Prof. Goodchild drew attention to the ethics of GIS, remarking that “while software developers are maximising the use of general-purpose GIS packages, the public should exercise responsibility in using the software appropriately and repurposing it.”

Prof. Goodchild is a Senior Fellow at PAIR, and Chairman of the International Advisory Committee of the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute (SCRI).

Event date: 1/8/2025
Speaker: Prof. Michael GOODCHILD
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research

Catalysis can accelerate chemical reactions and plays a key role in producing cleaner and more economical fuels. On 17 September 2025, Prof. WANG Yong from Washington State University, USA, delivered a PAIR Distinguished Lecture titled “Catalysis: Driving Affordable Clean Energy”. He shared insights into the potential of advanced catalytic technologies in revolutionising fuel production and reducing emissions. The lecture attracted over 120 in-person attendees, with more than 17,900 online viewers tuning in via various social media platforms. At the beginning of his talk, Prof. Wang explained the definition of catalysis: the use of catalysts to lower the activation energy required to initiate a chemical reaction, thereby enabling reactions to proceed more rapidly and efficiently with minimal energy input. An excellent catalyst must possess high stability to effectively facilitate the interactions among reactants to form products.

Prof. Wang then introduced his team’s research achievements in the field of the Fischer-Tropsch process. They discovered that this process, developed in the last century, can convert coal, natural gas or biomass into liquid fuels, and that its reaction rate naturally fluctuates between high and low levels. This intriguing phenomenon may pave the way for more efficient fuel production in the future.

Prof. Wang also discussed how catalytic converters in vehicle exhaust systems use metals such as platinum, palladium, and rhodium to purify emissions and reduce pollutants. He pointed out that hydrothermal ageing techniques can be used to stabilise single-atom catalysts and enhance their catalytic activity.

In summary, these studies demonstrate the immense potential of advanced catalytic technologies in revolutionising fuel production and emissions control, laying the foundation for cleaner and more efficient energy systems.

The subsequent question-and-answer session was chaired by Prof. WANG Lianzhou, Chair Professor of Energy Materials in the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology. Both in-person and online audiences engaged in fruitful exchanges and discussions with the two professors.

Event date: 17/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. WANG Yong
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research

Metamorphosis is an innate natural attribute in the evolution and survival of species. The development of shape-shifting robots is a core area within the field of intelligent structures. By integrating computational intelligence, there is hope for achieving true embodied intelligence in today’s rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence.

Prof. DAI Jiansheng, Chair Professor at King’s College London, United Kingdom, Dean of Institute of Robotics, South University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), China and Chair Professor at SUSTech–KCL Joint School, shared the latest developments in robotics at the PAIR Distinguished Lecture titled “Embedded Intelligence in Robotics” on 15 September 2025. The lecture attracted over 140 in-person participants and an online audience of more than 14,900 via various social media platforms.

At the beginning of his presentation, Prof. Dai introduced how his team has eliminated the need for adding components or dismantling structures, instead directly incorporating metamorphosis into robot design. This has led to a disruptive transformation in robotic structures, fundamentally altering traditional design approaches. Drawing inspiration from biological metamorphosis in nature and the art of origami, and combining geometry, mechanics, mathematics and kinematics, he explained how the design of shape-shifting robots is evolving towards multi-modal, multi-structural, multi-topological, and multi-degree-of-freedom structures. This is to keep pace with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and to enhance robots’ adaptability to their operating environments and challenging tasks.

Prof. Dai pointed out that metamorphosis has expanded the possibilities for robotic structural design, leading to innovative metamorphic outcomes such as novel legged robots, dexterous hands, solar arrays, metamaterials and flexible electronics. He further noted that today’s robots combine both rigid and flexible characteristics, offering compliance and safety, and are distinguished by elastic mechanism dynamics, novel variable-stiffness mechanisms and highly integrated perception-driven systems. In the future, robots will focus on morphological innovation and intrinsic safety, incorporating new materials, soft or continuum structures, metamorphic and biomimetic features. This signals that, over the next decade, robotics will move into a new technological era characterised by bio-integration, living entities, high-performance living systems and hybrid life systems. In summary, the key to the future development of robotics lies in continuous transformation and innovation.

Following the presentation was a lively question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. ZHANG Dan, Chair Professor of Intelligent Robotics and Automation in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The audience engaged in a productive discussion with Prof. Dai.

Event date: 15/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. DAI Jiansheng
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary

Virtual reality (VR) provides an immersive and interactive setting for language learning, allowing learners to practise various aspects of language in context-rich, naturalistic environments. Unlike traditional book-based methods, VR-based language training is expected to engage a broader network of brain regions by integrating sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. This raises important questions in the field of experience-dependent brain plasticity—specifically, whether immersive learning leads to more widespread or qualitatively different neural changes compared to more focal learning approaches. The talk will open with an overview of short- and long-term brain plasticity, setting the stage for understanding how the brain adapts during language learning. It will then present key findings from research on virtual reality-based language training, highlighting its potential to enhance learning through immersive experiences. Finally, the talk will share preliminary results from ongoing studies on single-session Mandarin learning in VR, along with the recent development of an interactive language puzzle game aimed at exploring cognitive engagement and neural activation in virtual environments.

Event date: 12/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. Johan MÅRTENSSON
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

No individual looms larger in historical accounts of 19th century China than Imperial Commissioner LIN Zexu. Yet, his legacy remains mixed. Most historical accounts characterize LIN’s attempt to end the illicit opium trade as ill-conceived, conservative, and ultimately resulting in his ignominious exile to a remote corner of the empire. In this talk, Prof. ATWILL focuses on LIN’s post-Opium War career to upend traditional accounts of the Opium War and to allow us to see with new eyes how Qing China faced global challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Event date: 29/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. David G. ATWILL
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

In the last two decades the contribution of neuroscience to bilingualism, in terms of discovering the neural architecture, has been enormous. Up-to-date we know how bi- and multilinguals store their languages, how and where they are represented in the human brain and how bilinguals control their languages in order to avoid unwanted language interferences during speech. Old myths that distinct languages are differently stored in the brain have been completed confuted. Neuroscientific studies have also highlighted neural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals for several cognitive functions, even for those circumstances where no behavioral differences exist. Neuroimaging studies have further shown different neural aging trajectories for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals underlining that the bilingual brain may be better protected against aging effects and cognitive decline.

During my presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the state of the art and then illustrate and discuss new research lines such as studying the foreign language effect, the effects of sleep and bilingualism on general cognition, the effects of linguistic distance on the bilingual brain and the importance of study the bilingual connectome. Lastly, we will discuss how to focus on individual differences in bilingualism research and heritage language speakers.

Event date: 8/10/2025
Speaker: Prof. Jubin ABUTALEBI
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

This presentation examines processes of subjectification whereby Chinese gods affirm unique personas and engage humans and each other in intersubjective interactions. In so doing, it develops relational approaches to study divine-human sociability. The vast array of ritual techniques developed over the longue durée in China to allow the gods to “talk back” to humans and create bonds have allowed these gods to affirm themselves as persons and subjects – even though there was also resistance against such developments. This lecture will propose an overview of the ritual techniques available for such personification and subjectification processes and their historical development in the Chinese world. It will then explore some of the theoretical and comparative dimensions of such processes and their consequences for our understanding of subjectivity.

Event date: 10/06/2025
Speaker: Prof. Vincent GOOSSAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Until recently, there were two main ways of obtaining information about words and expressions. The first was to analyze large text data sets (corpora) and calculate the frequency with which words and phrases occur, as well as the typical contexts in which they occur. The second was to ask participants to provide subjective information about words and phrases, such as the familiarity of the stimuli or the age at which they are typically acquired. The development of large language models has given us a third option. Instead of asking participants for information, we can query large language models. The results show that the information obtained from those models is just as good and often even better than the information obtained from people, especially when the model is tuned to a few thousand stimuli.

Event date: 30/05/2025
Speaker: Prof. Marc BRYSBAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Prof. Gao began his presentation with a brief outline of important role that mechanics plays in the development of structural and functional materials, enlightening the audience on the recent advances in nanostructured materials, biomedical materials, mechanical metamaterials, soft actuators, flexible electronics, tunable mechanochromics, regenerative mechanomedicine and many more.
He further illustrated how fundamental principles of mechanics enable the proactive modulation and programming of properties in both engineering and biological systems. Through case studies, Prof. Gao highlighted the breakthroughs in mechano-energy, mechano-interfaces, and mechano-materials, demonstrating their transformative potential.

Event date: 13/06/2025
Speaker: Prof. GAO Huajian
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research