Croucher engineers shine in Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Prize
The prize is regarded as the highest accolade in the field of engineering science and technology in China. Established in 1996, it is presented biennially to honour Chinese engineers and scientists who have made outstanding achievements and significant contributions in the field of engineering technology and engineering management.
Professor Alfonso Ngan (Croucher Senior Research Fellowship 2009, Croucher Fellowship 1992, Croucher Scholarship 1991) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Professor Michael R Lyu (Croucher Senior Research Fellowship 2008) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) are among the 41 awardees from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Ngan is the Acting Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), Kingboard Professor in Materials Engineering, and Chair Professor in Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, HKU.
An expert in engineering materials, he is interested in crystal defects and their modelling, and nano-mechanics and their applications in biological systems. He has solved key issues in the deformation mechanism of materials at the microscopic scale.
His work has contributed significantly to the understanding of new phenomena and behaviour arising in micron-sized metals, finding applications in micro-electromechanical systems. He has developed a new method to simulate plastic deformation of metals based on the dynamics of the density function of dislocations. This method can handle all types and quantities of dislocations to improve the efficiency and reliability of dislocation dynamics simulation, which is expected to guide the development of advanced materials.
His “rate jump” test method for nanomechanical testing has been widely adopted, and developed into a Chinese National Standard. In addition, he has invented a new type of actuating materials driven by visible light and electrochemical signals, which can be used to drive insect-scale robots. Ngan has applied for a US patent and is conducting applied research with industrial partners to develop these materials for applications.
Meanwhile, Lyu, Professor of the Faculty of Engineering at CUHK, is a world-renowned scholar in software reliability engineering. His research has been dedicated to the theory and application of software reliability engineering, together with distributed systems, cloud computing, services computing, big data analytics, and machine learning.
In particular, Lyu has made significant contributions to software reliability modelling, measurement, analytics, and applications. He has developed an integrated paradigm with advanced techniques for software reliability engineering, and proposed a series of innovative software reliability modelling approaches.
Lyu formulated the first design paradigm for N version programming, enabling design diversity and the development of fault tolerant software. He was also a pioneer in successfully employing software reliability prediction and fault tolerance techniques in services computing, enabling systematic service reliability design and measurement.
Lyu’s inventions have been actively commercialised in industrial projects, including telecommunication systems, local area networks, web services, cloud computing platforms, and smartphones. His solutions to the problems of software reliability modelling, estimation, measurement, and analytics achieved breakthrough results in the field.
To view Professor Ngan’s Croucher profile please click here.
To view Professor Lyu’s Croucher profile please click here.