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New Efforts to Promote InternationalizationIndian Professor and Interns joined CUHK Engineering
Chinese and Indian engineers are now playing a key role in the globalized IT world. In Silicon Valley, “IC” refers to Indians & Chinese and both together comprise more than one third of the engineers in the Valley. Aligned with the University’s direction in internationalization, the Faculty of Engineering, CUHK, is actively establishing collaborative relationships with different technology institutes in India. “I+C > 2” is the formula. The Faculty strongly believes that the CUHK/IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) together will build a stronger R&D forces leading to more substantial and influential research outputs.
"IT industry has become the major driving force of Indian economic growth. This triggers us to rethink the potentials of IT in Hong Kong. We have invited Professor JAGGI from India to join us, and would continue to recruit top research talents from China and India to establish a small ‘IC’ community and to build up the Silicon Valley culture in the Faculty." said Professor Wong Kam-Fai, Associate Dean, Faculty of Engineering, CUHK.
Born in India, educated in US and now teaching in Hong Kong, Professor Sidharth (Sid) JAGGI is exemplary of his generation that are living in the globalized age. JAGGI received his Ph.D. degree from the California institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2006. He developed particular interest in Network Coding theory during his internship at Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA, USA) in the summers of 2002 and 2003. The theory is a breakthrough originated at CUHK. It belongs to the field of Information Sciences, one of the five areas in strategic research of CUHK.
Besides JAGGI, the Faculty has for the first time provided summer internship opportunities for six Indian undergraduates. “After I came to the faculty, other faculty members told me about the streams of email they received from India undergraduates, who expressed interests for internship in CUHK. I emailed my alma mater – IIT Bombay (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay) and the students’ response was overwhelming. We interviewed them and finally four students from IIT Bombay and two from IIT Guwahati were invited to CUHK.”
During the 11-weeks internship programme, the interns were supervised by professors from three different departments to research on projects related to network coding, speech processing and robotics. Some results of their internship were submitted to their respective institute as undergraduate thesis and some as papers for the International Conference like NetCod 2008 which will be held in CUHK next January.
Now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering, CUHK at the age of 28, the young academian reminds local students to pursue their real interest but not short term benefits. “The problem is that if you study for prospects, you can never compete with those who enjoy it, and your work in the future will not be enjoyable.”
Efforts to internationalize the faculty are on-going. JAGGI will give seminars to recruit postgraduate students from IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay in his next trip to India in August. More internship students from India are also expected in next year’s summer.
Interns and their three supervisors, Professor YAM Yeung, Chairman of Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (2nd from left), Professor Sidharth JAGGI, Department of Information Engineering (2nd from right), Professor Meng Mei-Ling, Department of System Engineering and Engineering Management (1st from right), together with Professor YUM Tak Shing, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering (3rd from left).
