PAIR Distinguished Lecture Series

The lecture commenced with a welcome speech by Prof. CHEN Qingyan, Director of PAIR, followed by a brief speaker introduction by Prof. Christopher CHAO, Vice President (Research and Innovation).
In his presentation, Prof. Brilakis first gave a brief introduction to digital twins (DT), pointing out that DT plays a central role in digital transformation. Next, he elaborated on the application of DT in the construction industry and explained how DT is involved in the planning, design, construction, maintenance and operation processes. He introduced research conducted at the University of Cambridge on inexpensive methods for generating object-oriented infrastructure geometry, detecting, and mapping visible defects on the resulting DT, automatically extracting defect spatial measurements, and sensor and sensor data modelling. Prof. Brilakis also provided examples of how these resulting DT are further exploited in design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA), mixed-reality-enabled mobile inspection, and proactive asset protection from accidental damage. To conclude, Prof. Brilakis stated that DT, smart materials, data science, and automation & bobotics, constitute important digital assets for driving sustainability, and pointed out the future development directions in these areas.

A question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. DING Xiaoli, Director of the Research Institute for Land and Space (RILS), and Prof. WANG Yuhong, Member of RILS, followed. This session provided both the online and on-site audience with an opportunity to engage in a fruitful discussion with Prof. Brilakis.

In the lecture, Prof. Batty gave an overview of the development of the science of cities in the last 50 years. Drawing on the system approach and complex theory, he explained that urban science involves top-down and bottom-up thinking; it is a systematic, complex and evolving discipline built on knowledge in social physics, economics, transportation and numerous scientific methods that yield theories. He illustrated this with city morphology examples from the UK and the Greater Bay Areas (GBA) generated by large-scale computer models. At the end of the lecture, Prof. Batty described some challenges with fractal geometry, size and scaling, networks, and building models currently faced by the field, and he suggested the way forward for the discipline.

In the lecture, Prof. Lao will introduce his 30 years of experience in acupuncture research and share his witness in the United States from exploration in early years to the accessibility in the current healthcare system. Prof. Lao will also share his opinion on the challenges and difficulties in acupuncture clinical research.

Smaller, faster-charging batteries are the answer for affordable and sustainable electric vehicles (EVs) for everyone, everywhere. The ability to quickly refill energy is profoundly important in order to reduce EV cost and demand for critical minerals. In this talk I will present asymmetric temperature modulation (ATM) approach to enabling 10-minute fast charging of energy-dense Li-ion batteries in any temperatures (even at -60°C) while still delivering remarkable cycle life. Recent disastrous events at EV charging stations caused by an arctic blast in Chicago will be given as an example of the dire need for quick energy refill in the extreme cold. Battery fast charging must also work in hot summers along with high-temperature stability of cycling and storage. We shall present novel thermal management concepts for extreme fast charging in both extreme cold and hot conditions. Overall, our development points to a new paradigm of battery design and thermal management without having to trade-off among fast charge, safety, lifetime, and cost.

The lecture commenced with a warm welcome address by Prof. CHEN Qingyan, Director of PAIR, followed by a brief speaker introduction by Prof. WANG Zuankai, Associate Vice President (Research and Innovation) of PolyU. In his presentation, Prof. Yang highlighted that urgent need for tissue/organ biomanufacturing owing to the shortage of donation for organ transplantation. He pointed out some challenges in the in vitro manufacturing of tissues/organs, particularly in relation to accurate design, precise fabrication, and functional induction, which underscore the imperative need for new methods for tissue/organ manufacturing. Next, Prof. Yang outlined the development roadmap of biomanufacturing and shared specific examples demonstrating the research progress in 3D bioprinting. In concluding his presentation, Prof. Yang shared his insights on the future direction for biomanufacturing, as well as some significant accomplishments by him and his team at Zhejiang University in the field.

A question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. Wang was followed. Both the online and on-site audience had a fruitful discussion with Prof. Yang.

In this talk, we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last ten years and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to impact our numerical scientific software significantly. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed for the effective and reliable use of (wide area) dynamic, distributed, and parallel environments. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as the management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile-time and run-time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run-time environment variability will make these problems much harder.

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, public interests for healthcare innovations significantly increase. In order to prepare the next pandemic, POSTECH is initiating a new engineering-based medical school. This new program aims to solve practical medical problems via innovative technology and put significant efforts for commercialisation. As a Program Chair for the new Medical Science and Engineering Program, I will share my experience and future plans. Further, we spin-off a start-up company, “Opticho”, from the research outcomes in my lab. I will share my experience how translate the lab toys to commercial products: not only excitement but also difficulty.

Universities conduct research for three reasons: to educate students, to contribute to society, and to understand the world. While society often holds a view of the scholar as a solitary and singular genius, in reality scholars today participate in a highly collaborative, worldwide search for shared understandings that stand the test of time and the scrutiny of others. The problems in the 21st century often demand effort by teams of researchers with resources at scale: laboratories and equipment, compute resources, and expert staffing. Working with faculty, students, and other stakeholders to identify the greatest opportunities and the resources needed to address them is both a privilege and a challenge for modern academic administrators. In this talk, I will share three examples: fostering collaborative proposal-writing; planning for shared capabilities in experimental facilities, data, and computation; and transforming academic structures.

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.

More than one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity (GR). One year later, Karl Schwarzschild solved the GR equations for a non-rotating, spherical mass distribution; if this mass is sufficiently compact, even light cannot escape from within the so-called event horizon, and there is a mass singularity at the center. The theoretical concept of a 'black hole' was born, and was refined in the next decades by work of Penrose, Wheeler, Kerr, Hawking and many others. First indirect evidence for the existence of such black holes in our Universe came from observations of compact X-ray binaries and distant luminous quasars. I will discuss the forty-year journey, which my colleagues and I have been undertaking to study the mass distribution in the Center of our Milky Way from ever more precise, long-term studies of the motions of gas and stars as test particles of the space time. These studies show the existence of a four million solar mass object, which must be a single massive black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt.