Appointment of Research Grants Council Chairman
***********************************************
The Government announced today (February 9) that the Secretary for Education, Dr Choi Yuk-lin, has appointed Professor Timothy Tong Wai-cheung as the Chairman of the Research Grants Council (RGC) for a term of three years with effect from March 1, 2024.
Professor Tong, an expert in the field of heat transfer, was the President of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University between 2009 and 2018. He has over 30 years of teaching, research and administrative experience, with a distinguished public service record. He is currently the Chairman of the Council of the Hong Kong Laureate Forum and a member of the InnoHK Steering Committee and the Global STEM Professorship Scheme Assessment Panel. His past notable public service roles include serving as the Chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Community Relations and a member of the Advisory Committee on Corruption of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
“Professor Tong is a prominent scholar, seasoned educator and university administrator. With his profound experience in higher education and research, I am confident that he will continue to strengthen the vibrant research culture in Hong Kong’s higher education sector and lead the RGC to scale new heights in the years to come,” Dr Choi said.
Dr Choi also paid tribute to Professor Wong Yuk-shan, the outgoing RGC Chairman, for his significant contributions and sterling leadership. “Over his past three years of service, the RGC has excelled and firmly established itself as a major academic research funding body in Hong Kong that is admired internationally and has contributed to strengthening the solid foundation of Hong Kong’s academic research. With Professor Wong at the helm, RGC’s support has not only expanded considerably, catering to the distinctive needs of researchers in all disciplines, at different career stages, but also deepened the academic exchange and collaboration with the Mainland,” she said.
The RGC advises the Government, through the University Grants Committee, on the needs of Hong Kong’s higher education institutions in academic research and on the distribution of funding for academic research projects undertaken by academic staff of higher education institutions. The RGC manages a variety of research funding programmes, including the General Research Fund, the Early Career Scheme, the Collaborative Research Fund, the Research Impact Fund, the Theme-based Research Scheme, the Areas of Excellence Scheme, the Strategic Topics Grant and various Joint Research Schemes. It has set up committees and subject panels to assess research bids in various disciplines. It also manages a number of fellowship schemes, such as the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme and the RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme.
Jan 24, 2024 | Business
The Global Partnership for Education (GPE), and the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), have released new research providing compelling evidence of the strong relationship between education and peace. Released on the International Day of Education, the analysis demonstrates how improvements in education levels are closely linked to more peaceful societies.
The past decade has been marked by lethal conflicts, crises and wars. Across the globe, wars keep taking countless lives, displacing civilians from their homes and leaving many more in a dire need of life-saving assistance. There is an urgent need to rebuild the foundations that can underpin lasting peace, and yet too often one of the most crucial of these, education, is often relegated to a development afterthought.
“This year began with a dismal global outlook for peace, but we can restore hope by urgently investing more in education,” said Laura Frigenti, GPE Chief Executive Officer. “It is time we heeded the mounting evidence that education is a smart, mutually sustaining investment in prosperity and peace.”
While the disastrous impacts of conflict on education are widely acknowledged, research on the reciprocal relationship between peace and education has been sparse and outdated. To fill this essential knowledge gap and provide evidence to drive sound policies, the GPE has partnered with the IEP to break down and better understand the relationship between education and peace.
Key finding: Countries with higher primary school completion rates are in general more peaceful. Conversely, countries that enjoy high levels of peacefulness have secondary school completion rates of 99 percent. On the other hand, countries that suffer from low levels of peacefulness have on average secondary school completion rates of only 52 percent.
Countries with high education levels enjoy more overall social and political stability, and the opposite is also true: countries with low education levels tend to experience a higher occurrence and intensity of internal conflict. In other words, better performance in education can reduce the severity and duration of societal violence and save lives.
Improvements in peace indicators see more investment in education. Countries that invest more in education enjoy higher levels of peacefulness. For example, in 2020, Namibia, one of the most peaceful countries in Africa, had the sixth-highest rate of government investment in education globally as a percentage of GDP.
Mounting evidence has shown that investing in education is essential for peacebuilding. There is an urgent need to ensure adequate resources are channeled to education. This can allow governments, donors and international organizations to live up to their collective responsibility of giving every girl and boy the opportunity to get the knowledge and skills they need to usher in a more peaceful and prosperous future.
For more information, visit globalpartnership.org and visionofhumanity.org.
NOTES TO EDITORS
About Global Partnership for Education (GPE): GPE is a shared commitment to ending the world’s learning crisis. We mobilize partners and funds to support nearly 90 lower-income countries to transform their education systems so that every girl and boy can get the quality education they need to unlock their full potential and contribute to building a better world.
About Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP): IEP is an independent, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress. It achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peacefulness; providing metrics for measuring peace; and uncovering the relationships between business, peace, and prosperity as well as promoting a better understanding of the cultural, economic, and political factors that create peace.
Contact Information
Mike Koslowski
IEP Senior Communications Advisor
mkoslowski@economicsandpeace.org
+61418410531
Tamara Kummer
GPE Head of Communications
tkummer@globalpartnership.org
+1 202 948 5395
SOURCE: Institute for Economics & Peace
View the original press release on newswire.com.
Topic: Press release summary
Jan 12, 2024 | International
Research Grants Council to present public lecture on Happy, Healthy, Longevity – AI Can Help on January 20
******************************************************************************************
The following is issued on behalf of the University Grants Committee:
In line with the Government’s initiative to promote STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) education for all, for fun and for diversity, the Research Grants Council (RGC) is organising a series of public lectures titled Happy, Healthy, Longevity – AI Can Help, covering areas including technology, innovation and health. The second lecture of the series will be held at the Hong Kong Science Museum on January 20 (Saturday). All are welcome.
The RGC has invited Assistant Professor of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Professor Wong Tsz-wai and Associate Director of University Research Facility of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence of the Education University of Hong Kong Professor Yu Leung-ho to talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates learning, helps medical diagnoses and saves lives. Details are as follows:
Time: 2.30pm – 4.30pm
Venue: Lecture Hall, 1/F, Hong Kong Science Museum
Language: Cantonese
Admission: Free (seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis)
Members of the public can also watch a live broadcast of the lecture through the Facebook page (www.facebook.com/hkscm) or the YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/user/hksciencemuseum) of the Hong Kong Science Museum.
First session: AI microscopy – High-speed imaging of cancer cells
————————————————————————————–
Professor Wong’s team has recently developed an AI-based microscope that revolutionises the ways cancer cells are detected before, during and after surgeries. Compared with the usual one-week processing time, it takes only three minutes for the AI-based microscope to provide high-resolution images of biological tissue samples from a patient that closely resemble images acquired using the highest clinical standard. The new technology enables fast and accurate medical diagnoses for all tissue types.
Second session: From saving lives to empowering learning: Wow, AI is so close!
———————————————————————————————————–
AI is finding its way into a wide range of applications, from personalised recommendation systems and chatbots to language learning and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Professor Yu will showcase several AI projects that have real-life applications, including suicide risk detection on social media, medical image diagnoses, AI-assisted language learning and assessment, and preference learning in social networks for personalised recommendations.
The RGC has been regularly organising public lectures since 2009, featuring various distinguished scholars as speakers. These lectures aim to promote research knowledge of Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions and to raise public awareness of the significance and value of local research work.
For enquiries, please call 2524 3987 or visit the University Grants Committee webpage (www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc/about/events/lectures/lectures.html). In addition, members of the public can register for the RGC’s email subscription service at www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc/about/subscribe to receive regular updates.
