News

10 December, 2017

Smart City Big Data Competition - in collaboration with Digital China and Kowloon East

Aiming to use the latest cool data mining and analysis technologies to change the city, the final round competition of “Smart City in Hong Kong” closed in HKUST on December 10, 2017. The event was held by Digital China, HKUST-BDI (Big Data Institute) and Energizing Kowloon East Office.

The Digital China and HKUST-BDI Cup “Smart City in Hong Kong” Competition started in September 10. The preliminary round of this competition has been end in November 20, and the top 5 teams entered the final and were invited to join the Exhibition and Elevator Pitch Session December 10, followed by a Business Plan Evaluation.

Digital China are now expanding into fields related to Internet In 2016, and has maintained its commitment to become China’s leading cloud services provider and big data expert. Therefore, there is a study aims to investigate the feasibility of developing Kowloon East into a Smart City district.

Competition projects are encouraged to focus on (but not limited to) the following areas: traffic and transportation, weather and environment, stock and company, social media hot topics, etc.

The final competition started at 2:00 p.m., there were four opening speeches by Professor Qiang Yang, Director of HKUST-BDI, Professor Lei Chen, Associate Director of HKUST-BDI, Mr. Kaiser CHEON, Vice President, Smart City, Digital China, and Ms. Brenda AU, Head of Energizing Kowloon East Office.

Professor Yang expressed appreciation to Digital China and Kowloon East for their 2 years collaboration. Professor Chen said this project was open to the whole Hong Kong society.



Mr. CHEON said that Digital China has involved to smart city in mainland China many years already, but for Hong Kong it is a new comer. It hopes working together with others to implement this idea in Hong Kong.



Also Ms. AU said that we want to learn more and get some inspiration from intelligent people, and find participants to address the very urgent issue in Kowloon East, so that we can make the city function much more smart way.

After then the 5 teams including Project-City, Taiwan AI, HKUST Marqhe, take stairs PLZ! as well as Polarisk showed their presentations, demos and Q&A.

The 5 judges for this competition were: Ms. Brenda AU, Head of Energizing Kowloon East Office, Dr. Yun Xie, Senior Vice President, Digital China, Mr. Kaiser CHEON, Vice President, Smart City, Digital China, Mr. Qiang Yang, Chair Professor and Head of Dept. of CSE, HKUST, as well as Mr. Lei Chen, Professor, Dept. of CSE, HKUST.







The final awards announced at 5:00 p.m., including the First Place Award: Team Taiwan AI whose topic was “Intelligent Traffic System”, and this project is aim to optimize the behavior of traffic lights to improve traffic efficiency; the Second Place Award: Team Polarisk and Team HKUST Marqhe; the Third Place Award: Team take stairs PLZ! and Team Project-City. Dr. Yun Xie, Ms. Brenda AU, and Mr. Kaiser CHEON presented the awards to the winners.



The closing speech was given by Dr. Yun Xie. He said that, “the students are very creative and I'm very interested in these researches. We can really make use of these ideas and promote them. Thanks to Prof. Yang and Prof. Chen for organizing this event, and thank the Hong Kong government for their support. I sincerely hope that future cooperation will have more outstanding achievements.”

Appendix: Competition Tasks

Team 1 HKUST Marque:

Smart Traffic Monitoring System

Monitoring traffic is essential for drivers, passengers and emergency services. A comprehensive, accurate and real-time source of traffic information can help improving the efficiency of road usage and arrival time of emergency services.
This project proposed a deep-learning based computer vision model to provide high quality road condition information without human interference.

Team 2 Project-City:

Fire Services Command and Control System

The aim of this project is to develop a Fire Services Information System, facilitating the command and control work of fire and rescue services so as to improve the efficiency of the actions and to reduce the risk of frntline officer.
With the help of this system, users can deploy resources, monitor the status of fronline officers and situation of the field and record the whole process for post- event investigation.
This project has several features, Control System(Visualiztion strategy deployment, Global Monitoring and Digitized records), Smart Exploration Vehicle(Remote control, Environment data collection and Mechanized units), Smart Helmet(Video streaming, Monitor Life expectancy and Digitized equipment) and Mobile Application(Immediate news, Emergency help and Information share).

Team 3 Polarisk:

Digital Traffic Diversion Recommendation Sign in Kowloon East

This project is to design digital road signs within Kowloon East to suggest diversion to get one place if there are alternative pathways, and ease the traffic situations. Different methodologies are proposed in order to form these recommendations to display on the electronic road signs.

Team 4 Taiwan AI:

Intelligent Traffic System

This project is aim to optimize the behavior of traffic lights to improve traffic efficiency. by installing cameras and chips one traffic lights to capture images of the traffic and send them to server, the server use computer vision to recognize the number of cars and train the reinforcement learning model continuously to feedback the optimal actions to traffic lights, such as increase red lights by 10 seconds...

Team 5 take stairs PLZ!:

Smart City Worry-Free Campus

This project (WORRY-FREE CAMPUS) is aim to construct a smart city system which consist of several sub-systems such as air quality forecasting system, traffic forecasting system, AQHI forecasting system, smart system of traffic control around Campus (Intelligent Monitoring System and Intelligent Controlling System) and Smart System of Noise Supervise around Campus, in order to create an environment-friendly society mainly for schools. This project mainly provides a method to give a real-time prediction of air quality, especially for students and their parents. The aim of worry-free campus is to provide real-time and forecasting data of AQI, traffic volume and traffic noise around Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools for Hong Kong Education Bureau, and to serve primary and secondary school students and their parents by using public education app. It will provide health and safety protection for primary and secondary school students in Hong Kong.