It has been an exciting winter and spring for the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Team, a sub-team of the HKUST Robotics Team. In November 2011, the team received a Merit Award in the Tertiary Student Project category at the 11th International Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Awards. The awards event aims to spur ICT innovation and creativity in the region. In April 2012, the team's underwater robot qualified for the 2012 MATE International ROV Competition in Florida, where the HKUST students were able to meet up with teams from around the world. Thanks go to DHL Express for logistics consultation and for sponsoring the robot's transportation and to RS Components for sponsoring the electronic components and equipment.

A Computer Science and Engineering programming team advanced to the ACM-ICPC World Finals 2012 after a strong showing in the Asia regional heats for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC). The HKUST Optimus Prime team came second in the Phuket round and third in the Fukuoka round. It was the second consecutive year that a CSE team reached the world finals and the fourth time overall.

Doctoral candidate Hong Cai, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won the Best Student Paper Award (Champion) at the 12th IEEE Photonics Society Hong Kong Chapter Postgraduate Conference in December 2011. Her winning paper was entitled "Optical Manipulation of Micro and Nanoparticles Using Multimode Interference Power Splitters", co-authored with Prof Andrew W Poon. The paper was selected from 22 postgraduate research submissions.

PhD student Jie Dai, Computer Science and Engineering, and Prof Bo Li received the Best Paper Award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2011 in Houston, US, for their work on “Collaborative Caching for Video Streaming among Selfish Wireless Service Providers". Their study was partly supported by Huawei. IEEE GLOBECOM is the IEEE Communications Society flagship conference.

Three Electronic and Computer Engineering postgraduate students received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE Student Symposium on Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits in December 2011 in Hong Kong. MPhil student Xiaohao Hu’s award-winning paper was entered in the Solid-State Circuits category and entitled "An Efficiency-Enhanced Operation Scheme for Non-Inverting Buck-Boost DC-DC Converter". It was co-authored with Prof Philip Mok and Dr Xiaocheng Jing. Fan Yang was also recognized in the Solid-State Circuits category for the paper "An Industrial Multi-Node Network Design Based on DC Power Line Communication", co-authored with Prof Philip Mok. Lining Zhang gained an award in the Electron Devices category for a paper on "Statistic Variations in Vertically Stacked Silicon Nanowire Transistors", co-authored with Prof Mansun Chan. Both are PhD students.

Ka Wo Lam and Tsz Him Mak, both Year 3, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won the Bronze Award in the Design for Elderly Competition 2012 (Product Design for Elderly Division). The pair, together with a student from the School of Science, designed a cost-effective wireless lighting device for the elderly. The contest enables students to explore their potential and raises awareness about the needs of the elderly among young people.

PhD candidate Li Li, Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, received second prize in the Best Student Paper Competition at the Third POMS-HK International Conference, organized by the Production and Operations Management Society – Hong Kong Chapter. The paper was entitled "Proactive Transshipment Coupled with Price Commitment Postponement Does More Than Stock Balancing".

MPhil student Chi Yan Tso, Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the Arup Research Prize 2012 for his contribution to the development of a composite adsorbent for a waste heat powered adsorption cooling system.

A paper by PhD student Liang Wu, Electronic and Computer Engineering, was accepted for presentation at the 2012 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The annual conference, also known as the "Chip Olympics", is the most prestigious forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. The paper examined "A 4-Path 42.8-to-49.5GHz LO Generation with Automatic Phase Tuning for 60GHz Phased-Array Receivers". The conference was held in San Francisco in February 2012.

Fuxin Zhuang, Year 3, Electronic and Computer Engineering, won second prize in the IEEE Hong Kong Section 2011 Student Paper Contest for his paper "Signal Processing for Interference Mitigation in MIMO Networks: Cooperative Base-Stations and Linear Receivers".