Chinese New Year: Why the Year of the Dog will be a great year for research

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China celebrates Lunar New Year today and it has been a momentous twelve months for research and innovation.

In the last year, Imperial College London and Chinese partners have published more than 600 exciting discoveries, started new partnerships and continued to tackle global challenges.

Chinese New Year celebrated at Imperial

Here are some of the highlights from the last year and projects to look forward to as we enter the Year of the Dog:

Improving global health

Tsinghua UniversityEarlier this year Imperial announced a major new research partnership to explore ways of reducing health inequalities in cities around the world.

Partnering with Tsinghua University and Anzhen Hospital in China, among other institutions around the world, the research teams will gather evidence on issues affecting the health of people in urban environments, and work with policymakers to develop evidence-based policies for improving the health of billions of city dwellers.

Beijing and Ningbo are two of the ten cities that will be studied by the researchers in the project funded by Wellcome.

Funding new science

Tsinghua signing agreementIn December Imperial and Beijing's Tsinghua University launched a joint seed fund to support early-stage bold scientific ideas.

The Tsinghua-Imperial Research and Innovation Fund aims to kick-start innovative research projects and concepts that are showing signs of promise but are at an early stage in development and need funding to progress.

The awards are expected to cover small-scale experiments, the development of prototypes, and will enable academics and students from both institutions to collaborate and exchange ideas more easily.

Air pollution and renewable energy

Reducing air pollution through renewable energy is a global priority and offshore wind technology is seen as a good investment.

Researchers from Imperial and China are collaborating on an international project to develop the next generation of offshore windfarms.

The FENGBO project, named after the Chinese god of wind, will have access to the fastest supercomputer in the world to carry out simulations and help design more efficient and cheaper wind farms.

Developing offshore wind farms in China is the main focus of the project.

Winning entrepreneurs

Competition winnersAn Imperial spinout company won the 2017 China-UK Entrepreneurship Competition, held in Tongnang, Chongqing, China.

LoMaRe Technologies Limited are focused on developing revolutionary technology concepts based on the latest advancements in thin-film technology, using advanced materials and exploring the boundaries of new material classes.

The team will initially target the development of novel non-volatile memory devices.

The competition, which was part of the 2017 Belt and Road Forum in Technology, was aimed at encouraging business collaborations between China and the UK while connecting bright entrepreneurs with early-stage investors and venture capital businesses.

Robotic surgery

Hamlyn CentreImperial’s Director of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Professor Guang-Zhong Yang showcased his work to the Chinese Vice Premier Madame Liu, among other delegates at the UK-China Science and Innovation Forum last year.

Some of the world’s most advanced medical robotics are being developed by Imperial scientists and Chinese partners.

Professor Yang has helped to invent micro-surgical robots for complex procedures during operations. Professor Yang and his team are currently developing a fibre-optic medical robot that could access the body through tiny cavities.

The ‘fibre-bot’ will be the width of a human hair and could access hard-to-reach parts of the body to search for signs of cancer.

Artificial intelligence and big data

Data Science InstituteImperial academics are working at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and are using big data and machine learning to create smart cities.

Professor Yike Guo is the Director of Imperial’s Data Science Institute and is investigating the links between population behaviour and infrastructure in China.

His team of researchers are monitoring passenger flow on Shanghai’s Metro and other rail networks across the country.

By collecting second-by-second data at every single station, they can build up a picture of how the network behaves, and suggest improvements.

Transforming Universities

Shanghai alumniPresident Alice Gast attended a major universities summit in Shenzhen, China where she spoke about the impact of artificial intelligence in research and teaching.

Delivering the keynote address at the Times Higher Education Asia Universities Summit, Professor Gast said: “Artificial intelligence is already demonstrating its promise to advance research. At the same time, it presents challenges because of the pace of its advance and the disruptions that it will create.”

President Gast noted that in China, hospitals are using virtual doctors to read CT scans.

Ahead of the summit, President Gast attended an alumni event in Shanghai that was attended by more than 150 former students and friends.

Reporter

Stephen Johns

Stephen Johns
Communications Division

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Contact details

Tel: +44 (0)20 7594 9531
Email: s.johns@imperial.ac.uk

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