A column article by Prof. Erwin HUANG, Adjunct Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD), on how to cope with the arrival of the AI era. He noted that AI is making knowledge and skills far cheaper and easier to access, so the real value of people will shift toward judgment, self-awareness, and the ability to adapt.

Led by Prof. SU Hui, Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Prof. ZHANG Limin, Head and Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Prof. ZHAI Chengxing, Associate Professor in the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA) and the MUSICO (Multi-Spectral Imaging Carbon Observatory), a lightweight, high-resolution system designed to accurately monitor the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane at key emission sources in the global mid-to-low latitudes, was recently installed in the Tiangong Space Station aboard the Tianzhou-10 cargo craft.

HKUST will host the 2nd AI Film Festival (AIFF) this Saturday and Sunday at the Shaw Auditorium. As one of the significant events celebrating HKUST's 35th anniversary, the Festival is themed "New Boundaries, New Life". It introduces multiple new awards, including the Best Technical Innovation Award, the Best Human-AI Collaboration Award, the Best Realist Exploration Award, and the Best Cross-Cultural Dialogue Award. In response to emerging creative trends, two new competition sections have also been launched this year: the AI Vertical Shorts Section and the AI Music Section. The Festival attracted over 1,300 submissions from established and emerging filmmakers, video creators, and students across nearly 80 countries and regions, underscoring the growing global momentum of AI-enabled filmmaking.

A column article by Prof. Erwin HUANG, Adjunct Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD), on Tim COOK's journey of steering Apple. Prof. Huang argued that Cook’s leadership at Apple has been more important than people often realize. Instead of focusing on flashy product launches like Steve Jobs, he remarked that Cook turned Apple into a highly integrated global system built for scale, stability, and long-term growth.

Wen Wei Po featured HKUST's BSc in Innovation, Design and Technology (IDT) as part of its series on universities' STEAM programs. Beyond its core curriculum, the program emphasizes cultivating students' self-learning abilities, resilience, adaptability, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and innovative thinking. Applicants are required to present a Design and Technology Portfolio during interviews to showcase their projects and extracurricular achievements. Designed to nurture future leaders in innovation and technology, the program has become highly competitive, with an average of about 17 applicants vying for one place in 2025.

Prof. Harry YANG, Assistant Professor in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC), collaborated with Alibaba's Z-Image team, the University of California, San Diego, and CUHK to propose the D-OPSD method, enabling fast image generation AI models to learn new concepts without losing speed or quality. By applying self-distillation, the method preserves efficient image generation pathways and supports continuous learning while preventing forgetting.

An article by Prof. Christine LOH Kung-Wai, Chief Development Strategist in the Division of Environment and Sustainability (ENVR), on the limitations of political labels – such as "democratic" and "authoritarian" – in describing the complexities of modern governance, particularly in light of Chinese Mainland's rise.

Prof. XUE Wei, Assistant Professor in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) and the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA), collaborated with members from CUHK and other leading institutions to publish an article titled "Talker-T2AV: Joint Talking Audio-Video Generation with Autoregressive Diffusion Modeling". The study introduces the Talker-T2AV framework, which significantly advances the synchronization of audio and video generation and addresses longstanding challenges in multimodal synthesis.

Prof. RAO Anyi, Assistant Professor in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC), collaborated with members from several partner universities to introduce UniVidX, a unified multimodal framework for versatile video generation. It utilizes random condition masking, decoupled gated LoRA, and cross-modal self-attention to uniformly handle fifteen different video tasks. This framework achieves high-quality intrinsic decomposition and layer synthesis with limited training data.

An article by Prof. Christine LOH Kung-Wai, Chief Development Strategist in the Division of Environment and Sustainability (ENVR), on Hong Kong's tourism evolving from a transactional model to an experiential one involving neighborhood walks, rural villages, food culture, exhibitions, shows, nature trails, and everyday urban life. She remarked that the challenge for Hong Kong is no longer only handling visitor numbers, but strengthening what makes the city distinctive.