Lingnan University held the conferment ceremony for the Lingnan University Institute for Advanced Study (LUIAS) today, 11 April, welcoming three leading international scholars―Prof Chen Shiyi , President of the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, and Prof Yang Qiang, Professor Emeritus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), who were made Lingnan Fellows, and the title of Senior Lingnan Scholar was conferred on Prof Zhou Dingxuan, Professor and Head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Sydney—to recognise their important contributions to academic achievements.
Prof S. Joe Qin, President and Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science at Lingnan University, officiated the conferment ceremony and warmly welcomed the three distinguished scholars joining LUIAS. He said, “Today marks a significant milestone for LUIAS. The addition of the three world-class scholars with their extensive expertise in the mathematical and scientific fields along with their outstanding achievements will bring fresh momentum to Lingnan. Their contributions will not only improve the University’s academic strengths, but also help create a first-rate academic environment, which nurtures interdisciplinary, research-oriented, well-rounded scholars, further enhancing our efforts to bridge the arts and sciences, and foster global exchanges. We look forward to our young scholars being inspired by their work, and fully engaging in interdisciplinary research to address the pressing societal challenges of today’s world through innovative research.”
Prof Chen Shiyi is an internationally known mechanic and physicist, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the World Academy of Sciences for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries. He is currently President of the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, and was one of the first scholars from Mainland China to be elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society after China’s reform and opening-up, and also selected as one of the "40 Influential Returnees in 40 Years of Reform and Opening-up". Prof Chen has accomplished outstanding achievements in the fields of fluid turbulence theory, computational fluid dynamics, and industrial software, and is an originator of the Lattice Boltzmann computational method, which is one of the most viewed research topics worldwide in the research of hydrodynamics.
Prof Yang Qiang is Professor Emeritus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, renowned in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) and the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), as well as of multiple prestigious organisations, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electronic and Electric Engineers (IEEE). His research focuses on transfer learning and federated learning, and he is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of “IEEE Transactions on Big Data” and “ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology”.
Prof Zhou Dingxuan is Professor and Head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, named in 2014-2017 by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics as a highly-cited researcher. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journals “Analysis and Application” and “Mathematical Foundations of Computing”, and serves on the editorial boards of more than ten other journals. His research areas include the theory of deep learning, neural networks, statistical learning theory, wavelet analysis, approximation theory, data science, and applications.
After the conferment ceremony, Prof Zhou Dingxuan delivered an eloquent speech on the "Theory of Deep Neural Networks" in the LUIAS Distinguished Lecture Series, explaining the major breakthroughs that deep learning has enabled in domains such as speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Prof Zhou emphasised the necessity for a solid theoretical foundation to better understand the modelling and generalisation capabilities of deep learning models, which can improve the predictive power of machine learning models when faced with new samples. He also analysed the unique properties of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as compared to traditional fully connected networks, and elaborated on the mathematical theory related to rectified linear unit activation in deep learning.
LUIAS was established in 2024 in order to attract leading scholars from diverse disciplines, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and integrate advanced technologies with comprehensive education. The Institute hosts conferences, workshops, and forums to promote knowledge-sharing among researchers and experts. The Director of LUIAS, Prof Richard M. Walker, is one of the outstanding scholars engaged through the Lingnan-60 Global Talent Recruitment, an authority on public administration specialising in citizen-government relationships and effective governance. He has served on editorial boards for key journals, and received several awards for his research. As Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Government and International Affairs, he will strengthen LUIAS’s pursuit of interdisciplinary collaboration.
