The HKU IDS community continues reaching new height along their research journey! We are excited to announce that Mr. Xubin Ren, 2^nd year PhD candidate at the Institute, has been selected for the “NSFC Young Student Basic Research Program (PhD candidate) (國家自然科學基金青年學生基礎研究項目(博士研究生))”! Xubin is one of the only 8 students awarded to this programme under The University of Hong Kong, remarking his outstanding academic results and excellence in his research areas. His awarded project is titled “Towards Robust and Explainable Generalized Recommender Systems (具有健全性與可解釋性的可泛化推薦演算法研究)”.

Organized by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Program aims at nurturing PhD candidates of their independent scientific research ability, as well as stimulating innovative ideas in facilitating high-quality, impactful works of basic and fundamental research. Each awardee will be sponsored CNY 300,000. Xubin is currently supervised by Professor Chao Huang, HKU-100 IDS Scholar, whose research interests lie with probabilistic graphic models, data mining, and recommender systems.

Let’s join me in congratulating Xubin and Professor Huang’s team for the remarkable achievements!