Tour of CityU Research and Academics

1/10/2008

We started the day with a tour of the Information Engineering Digital Computer Lab. The lab seemed very modern, with plenty of workstations, equipment for electrical engineering, and other interesting devices. The professor who showed us around and gave his department's presentation was very well spoken, and spoke very highly of their Cisco program for undergraduates, which specifically appealed to me, as getting my Cisco certification is one of my future goals. I particularly like how the certification training is built into their curriculum.

Next, we toured the Optoelectronics Lab, where we we shown basically all the uses of fiber optics (or so it seemed). The technology seems extremely promising and CityU seems to be in the forefront in terms of research. The comparison of the old wiring system compared to the same bandwidth over fiber optic cable particularly astounded me.

After that, we visited the Audiovisual Lab, which seemed to be a very topic-open research lab with a cool sound-isolating chamber that tested speakers. One could not hear a thing from the outside city of Hong Kong. Next, we went to the Power Electronics room where we were given a presentation on Chaos theory and allowed to play with a remote-controlled spider. The helicopter simulator was also amusing, although the software seemed archaic and we could not get it working by hand.

Then proceeded a short break in the University library, where some books were considerably more expensive (such as Harry Potter, which even had a different cover), while textbooks were cheaper than in the US, on top of which was the fact that they gave us a student discount.

We then toured the SMT Virtual Reality therapy room in the CS Department, which was used to give interactive therapy to children who were abused and/or suffered from other conditions. The progress they've made seemed significant, the the machine was very well designed. I would love to help out with their research as the technology behind the machine must be amazing. Definitely the place to go if one is looking into Virtual Reality.

Overall, I was very impressed with the research at CityU and it's integration into the academic system. Their research areas seem very promising and I think the university has done a great deal to fund it, and should continue.