University of Hong Kong

Students are required to undertake a group design project that runs from September to April of the following year. The project topics are stipulated either by teachers or by industrial sponsors. Each project group has two teachers acting as supervisors and an additional teacher serving as moderator. During the course of the project, supervisors communicate with the students and the concerned project sponsor to monitor the project progress. At the completion of the project, each project student presents
his/her achievements to the supervisors, moderator and sponsor via a written report and an oral presentation. This course aims to: (1) provide a problem-based learning experience for students to learn how to apply scientific knowledge and team-work approach to tackle design/engineering problems systematically, and (2) strengthen students’ inter-personal and communication skills through interaction with teammates, supervisors and sponsors. Typical project activities include: problem identification & definition; research into information pertaining to the problem, design & analysis; materials sourcing; communication; conducting experiments/making prototypes for verification and demonstration of results; writing reports and giving oral presentations.

This course is on the fundamental principles of heat transfer, covering heat conduction, heat convection and heat exchangers. The course objectives are: (1) to provide an understanding of fundamental principles of heat transfer; and (2) to enable students to use the fundamental principles for conducting thermal analysis and design of engineering problems. At the end of this course, students who fulfill the requirements of this course will be able to: (1) demonstrate an understanding of the principles that govern heat transfer processes; (2) analyze heat-transfer problems quantitatively; and (3) identify relevant engineering solutions in thermal systems. Topics include: Fourier’s law; heat-conduction equation; thermal conductivity; conduction; fins; basic convection principles; laminar and turbulent heat transfer in tubes and over plates; Reynolds analogy; types of heat exchangers; overall heat-transfer coefficient; log mean temperature difference; effectiveness-NTU method; heat exchanger design.

Who has felt authorized to narrate their life history and what has compelled them to tell explanatory stories that make sense of their lives? How accurate is it to call autobiography the history of the self? Do we encounter other histories or selves in autobiography? What is the history of autobiography and how do we read it? Historians reading autobiography for documentary evidence of the past and endeavoring to write about it objectively will find that their task is complicated by the autobiographer’s subjective and often highly creative engagement with memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. This course is intended for students who wish to explore the interdisciplinary links between autobiography, history, literature, and personal narrative, and to acquire strategic theories and cultural understanding for reading these texts.

This course introduces game theory and its useful applications. The course presents how to identify the common abuse of game theory and to avoid incorrect use of its terminology. The course covers basic concepts and techniques in game theory and applies these concepts and techniques to the analysis of different types of games. Topics include Nash equilibrium, sequential games, simultaneous games, sequential-simultaneous games, prisoners' dilemma, strategic moves, evolutionary games, collective action, uncertainty and information, and consolidation. 

Aviation is a rapidly expanding sector in developing economies like those in Asia. Aeronautical engineering is the foundation of aviation as a mode of transport. Together with space flight, aeronautics has been a driving force behind many of the modern technological development in the past century or so. This course aims to provide students with a solid foundation in the most important aspects of aircraft design and operation. The underlying science is common with many technological branches in general mechanical engineering, but it also has distinctive features that make aeronautics more challenging and interesting. For example, flow around aircraft is compressible with possible presence of shock waves while ordinary flows in engineering is low-speed and incompressible. The engine has similar thermodynamic cycles like that found in a gas turbine power plant but its main output is not derived from the turbine. Materials used in aircraft design must have the lowest possible weight for a given strength requirement. Specifically, the course will cover the following topics: aerodynamics and propulsion, materials and structures; safety and some aspects of operation and maintenance of aircrafts. Topics include: history of aeronautical science; wing aerodynamics; propulsion; flight mechanics; systems and airframe structures; fatigue-crack growth; crack monitoring; damage tolerance; metallic materials; composites; fibre-reinforced laminates; high-temperature alloys for turbines; creep damage.

This course examines the transformation of identity in Hong Kong through the analysis of the tropes of crises, home, and “border-crossing” in contemporary Hong Kong literary, filmic and other cultural texts. It explores how various crucial moments of transition in Hong Kong history have produced identity crises in the people of Hong Kong. Some of these intriguing moments include the communist takeover in 1949, the 1997 handover, as well as more recently the SARS outbreak, the urban redevelopment debates, and other current issues. It will also explore the possibility of understanding one’s sense of self/selves through the various practices of writing Hong Kong. It discusses critically the relation between nation and home, self and other, the individual and the collective, memory and forgetting to critique the cultural problems bound up in a space of flows called “Hong Kong.”

This course examines Buddhist writing culture from the perspectives of religious art and history of Chinese calligraphy. It will guide students to explore the theories, research methods and practice of Buddhist calligraphy through examining the calligraphy of Dunhuang manuscripts, Buddhist stone sutras, stone stele inscriptions from various ancient archaeological sites. The master calligraphers and Buddhist scribes will be examined. In addition to workshop demonstrations by the teacher, students will acquire the basic techniques, methods and practice of writing with brush. It will enable students learning how to write calligraphy mindfully with tranquility as the quintessence of Buddhist mental cultivation and modalities of writing cultures. They will also appreciate the essence of Buddhist texts, such as the Heart-sūtra and Diamond-sūtra.

This course studies experimental zoology describing interactions between animals and the environment. Emphasis is given to how living organisms obtain resources from the environment, gather information of environmental changes via sensory structures, and respond to adversities of environmental changes by adjusting their body physiology and biochemistry. Topics include energy metabolism, respiration, circulation, photoreception, color change and background adaptation, thermal regulation, muscle contraction and animal movement, and environmental stress and stress responses. 

This course examines concepts of system analysis and design. 

When you talk to ChatGPT, does it talk back? Does it really understand, or is it just a sophisticated sort of autocomplete? When DALL*E makes an image from your description, in the style of an author you like, is it plagiarizing that artist? Could a machine be conscious? Will AI revolutionize the economy? These are among the most interesting questions to ask at the moment. In this class, we'll ask them. We'll take a tour through 70 or so years of philosophical thought about artificial intelligence, from Turing to OpenAI, learning the concepts and theories that have been used to make sense of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the course, we'll look at more 'technical' material, about the nature of meaning and mind; in the second part, we'll turn to applied ethical and social issues.