Research

Pioneering Discovery – Unraveling Tomorrow’s Solutions Through Interdisciplinary Research.

AI and Arts & Humanities

HKU IDS explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, arts, and humanities, focusing on AI’s growth in social and economic contexts. Our scholars address philosophical questions about learning, consciousness, agency, and personhood in complex models.

We also work on understanding AI’s relationship with human values, safety, alignment, and unintended consequences. Additionally, we study societal impacts, including governance, regulation, social justice, welfare, and legal issues related to patents and AI infrastructure, aiming to foster responsible and ethical AI development.

Research Lab:

AI & Humanity Lab

AI for Science & Health

HKU IDS leverages AI for science and health, using data to accelerate medical breakthroughs, personalize treatments, and improve public health. The institute develops AI tools for predicting therapy responses, optimizing drugs, modeling disease spread, and addressing healthcare disparities. It explores AI’s role in mimicking human understanding, interpreting visual data, and decoding brain processes.

Future priorities include multimodal, trustworthy AI, and complex systems modeling to enhance diagnostics and policy-making. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, IDS aims to transform AI into a vital partner in scientific discovery and health advancement.

Cybersecurity

HKU IDS appies AI to cybersecurity, enhancing detection and prevention of attacks while addressing vulnerabilities in AI models and systems. They develop methods to identify software weaknesses, detect threats through large data analysis, and patch systems post-attack.

The team also focuses on strengthening AI security against adversarial attacks, model pollution, inference leaks, and other threats, aiming to create trustworthy, robust, and explainable AI systems. Their work seeks to balance the benefits of AI with the need for resilient cybersecurity protections.

Research Lab:

JC STEM Lab of Intelligent Cybersecurity

Fundamentals of AI & Data Science

The Fundamentals of AI and Data Science drive innovation by analyzing large datasets and mimicking human intelligence. Data Science extracts insights, while AI develops systems that learn and adapt, improving decision-making across industries like healthcare and finance.

HKU IDS excels through interdisciplinary, collaborative research, integrating advanced techniques to address issues like bias and data privacy. Our holistic approach promotes ethical innovation and sustainable development, enabling researchers and partners to tackle complex challenges and ensure technology benefits society responsibly.

Research Labs:

Intelligent Robotics & Systems

Our research in Intelligent Robotics focuses on advancing robotic manipulation and humanoid technologies toward artificial general intelligence. We use cutting-edge AI, combining Foundation Models with Reinforcement and Imitation Learning, to enable robots to perform complex tasks and interact socially, evolving through autonomous exploration.

Through international collaboration, HKU IDS addresses key challenges like the simulation-to-reality gap and scalability for real-world applications. Our work enhances robot efficiency and adaptability, impacting healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, and aims to make robots indispensable partners in solving global challenges and transforming industries.