Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) - Hong Kong

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The scientific communities of the U.S. and China suffer from a lack of direct contact between their junior members of the two countries, especially students. The proposed International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) program will support 24 U.S. undergraduate students to conduct research in applied mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) during the summer of 2016, 2017, and 2018. The IRES students will be assigned to teams, each consisting of two US and two Hong Kong students, and each team will work on a research project sponsored by a Chinese company or government agency. The US students will live and work at HKUST with students from Hong Kong. The project will be supervised overall by the PI, with local supervision by HKUST Mathematics Professor and Department Chair Yang Wang and Professor Shingyu Leung. The nine-week-long collaborative project is designed to expose U.S. students to the international mathematics research community at an early stage of their careers. The IRES project will increase the visibility of U.S. students in Hong Kong and China through their activities in the HKUST campus and through their direct collaboration with Hong Kong students. The US student participants will be about 50% women and 20% from an underrepresented minority group demonstrating NSF?s commitment to participation in STEM fields by under-represented minority groups. The IRES project will provide U.S. students with valuable experience in mathematics research, industrial research, international collaboration, and team work at a highly-regarded research institute. The research projects and sponsors will change every year, which is by design to keep the projects at the leading edge of scientific research. All projects involve mathematics on important current problems. Recent examples (and industrial sponsors) include Doubly Ensemble Movie Prediction with Social Media Data Using TBEEF (Baidu), Detection of Somatic Mutations in Sequenced Pair Samples (BGI), Probabilistic Radar-Based Nowcasting of Monsoonal Rainstorms in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Observatory), Improved Maximum Likelihood Detection in MIMO Systems (Huawei), and Intelligent Eye for the Visually Impaired (Lenovo). We expect each project to result in publications and lead to further research collaboration. The knowledge and skills that students learn from this project will better prepare them for their professional careers.