Staff Achievements 2024

Prof Alex Yu has been awarded the 2024 IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc) Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award for his contribution to MIMO communications with large-scale arrays and surfaces.

This award recognizes exceptional young researchers under the age of 35 for their creativity, research impact, and contributions to ComSoc activities. It is the highest honor for young researchers in the field of information and communication in the Asia-Pacific region. Four to six outstanding young scholars from the Asia-Pacific region (including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries and regions) are selected for this prestigious award every year.

The collaborative research team, comprising Prof Yongxin Guo (Chair Professor of EE), and scholars from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, has published a paper in the top journal – Nature Communications, on 29 November 2024.

Title: Urban skies safeguarded: innovative drone detection with programmable metasurface periscope Authors:

• Prof Yongxin Guo (Chair Professor of EE, City University of Hong Kong)
• Prof Hui Chu (Professor of School of of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology)
• Dr Hanjun Zhao (Postdoc of School of of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology)
• Dr Peng Li (Associate Professor of School of of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology)

This Nature Communications paper can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54672-6. To give you a glimpse of the research work, here is a quote from the abstract: By proposing a fully resonant structure and introducing a mode-alignment technology, we report an isotropic angle-insensitive programmable metasurface (PMS) whose phase response is stable with respect to different incident angles in both elevation- and azimuth-planes. A radar scheme that uses such a PMS as a periscope is also demonstrated to detect drones in a non-line-of-sight (N-LOS) scenario which usually happens in an urban environment. Our proposed scheme enables those targets even falling in shadow areas caused by high buildings to be successfully detected and tracked, which shows promising potentials in N-LOS target detections.

A team led by Prof Derrick Jiang and comprising Dr MO Liping (Postdoc), Mr MA Tianlu (PhD student), and Mr WANG Yibo (PhD student) won the Third Prize in China (Shenzhen) Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition 2024. The winning project is called “Electric Vehicle: Next-generation Nanocrystalline Smart Wireless EV Charger”.

The competition, organized by Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality, aims to serve as a platform to discover and support high-potential innovative enterprises and projects and drive the transformation of technological achievements into real-world applications, fostering the growth of startups and enterprises.

The paper “A Single-Source-Based Non-Isolated Micro-Inverter with Active Power Decoupling”, co-authored by Prof Henry Chung (Chair Professor) and scholars from Shanghai Maritime University, Aswan University, and Aalborg University, has won the Second Prize Paper Award of the Power Electronics Technical Committee (PETC) of the Industrial Electronics Society (IES).

The paper, presented at IECON (Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society) 2023 in the track “Power Electronic Converters”, was evaluated and selected to receive the award, which will be presented to the awardee at the IECON 2024 held in Chicago in November 2024.

The paper “Adaptive Level-Shift Gate Driver with Indirect Gate Oxide Health Monitoring for Suppressing Crosstalk of SiC MOSFETs” co-authored by Prof Henry Chung (Chair Professor), Mr Tang Ho Tin (PhD student supervised by Prof Henry Chung), and Prof Kevin J. Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) have won the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (TPEL) Prize Paper Award – Second Place.

Each year, the IEEE Power Electronics Society recognizes the papers deemed best among those published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics during the preceding calendar year. There were 89 regular paper nominations this round and the winning paper is one of the nine selected papers to receive the Second Place Prize Paper Award.

Three EE faculty have won the Research Excellence Awards 2024 organized by the College of Engineering in recognition of their excellent and impactful research and achievement.

Research Excellence Award
Prof K M Luk (Chair Professor)

Research Excellence Award for Junior Faculty
Prof Derrick Jiang (Assistant Professor)
Prof Cheng Wang (Associate Professor)

Prof Gengbo Wu, has been granted the NSFC Young Scientists Fund in the amount of RMB 300K for the project “Research on Multi-Harmonic Real-Time Imaging Based on Spatiotemporally Modulated Metasurface Antenna”, which aims to leverage the powerful electromagnetic control capabilities of spatiotemporal modulation metasurface antennas to study a real-time imaging technique called multi-harmonic near-field focusing. This technique enables real-time dynamic imaging without the need for focal point scanning or complex reconstruction algorithms.

The Young Scientists Fund is an important scheme under NSFC’s talent funding system to support young scientists to conduct basic research on topics of their choice, fostering the ability to independently undertake basic research and stimulating the creative thinking of young scientists in conducting research.

Prof Din-ping Tsai (Chair Professor) has won the 2024 Frontiers of Science Award (FSA) from the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), which honors the best papers published within the last 10 years across forty-two subareas of mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer and information sciences. The winning paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology 2018 is titled “A broadband achromatic metalens in the visible”.

Dr Junxiao Zhou, Postdoc supervised by Prof Tsai, has won the Best Poster Award (Silver Prize) at the 8th A3 Metamaterials Forum (A3 META) for the paper "Edge detection and quantitative phase imaging based on the metasurface". A3 META is a metamaterial symposium gathering leading researchers in Asian countries to discuss topics in artificial materials and surfaces in electromagnetic, acoustic, and other systems from DC to optical frequencies and beyond.

Prof Rosa Chan has received the Outstanding Teaching Awards (OTA) 2023-24 from the College of Engineering (CENG) in recognition of her innovative and effective approaches to teaching.

OTA of CENG has been established since 2019/20 and totally there are four EE recipients to date.

EE teams achieved remarkable results at the 49th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva (IEIG), winning 12 awards, including one Special Prize, five Gold Medals with Congratulations of the Jury, two Gold Medals, one Silver Medal and three Bronze Medals. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the international recognition of EE's research and scientific achievements.

The exhibition is the world’s most important event exclusively dedicated to inventions. It offers a unique opportunity for universities, inventors and researchers, industrial and commercial companies, associations, private and state organisms and institutions to present the results of their research, their inventions, and their new products. The 49th IEIG, held from 17 to 21 April in Switzerland, featured more than 1,000 inventions from 38 countries and regions around the world. The Hong Kong delegation has won 6 Special Prizes. The team led by Prof Stella Pang is one of the 6 winners of Special Prizes and the only team from CityU to clutch such a prestigious award.

For the list of winning teams and projects, please visit here

More details about this good news can also be found at CityU NewsCentre.