Under the tide of immigration, Hong Kong is also facing the impact of brain drain, and some people question whether academic freedom has been damaged.
Wong Yuk-shan, chairman of the Research Grants Council under the Education Grants Committee, responded to this statement today, emphasizing that academic freedom in Hong Kong "has always persisted and has not changed."
He admitted that some talents did leave, but more talents joined, and denied that the projects approved by the UGC had political input elements, emphasizing that everything was based on academic standards, contributions and achievements, "If you approve funding indiscriminately, you will definitely not. It’s
a misunderstanding.”
The RGC selected 8 research proposals in 2022/23, and the 8 projects received a total funding amount of 303 million yuan.
After the implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, some foreign researchers rated Hong Kong’s academic freedom index down to D level last year. Regarding the claim that Hong Kong’s academic freedom has been damaged, RGC Chairman Huang Yushan responded that Hong Kong’s academic freedom has always remained unchanged.
As for the brain drain under the immigration tide, he admitted that some people did leave, but more people joined, and the number of university talents continued to increase, including a group of accomplished and experienced scholars. The Scholars Collaboration Program, which has now attracted dozens of groups, emphasizes that "academic freedom is damaged, brain drain" is "non-existent, not serious, and business as usual."
Q: Earlier, some Legislative Council members criticized the UGC for appropriating funds indiscriminately, and also allocated funds to scholars who were accused of "Hong Kong independence", questioning the meaning of political input.
Huang Yushan clarified that the RGC will not arbitrarily grant funding, and reiterated that there are more than 800 reviewers, all of whom are well-known local, mainland and overseas scholars, who may have contributed and are well-known in their fields. Guarantee, the description of "chaotic criticism" is a misunderstanding.
As for political input, Huang clarified that there was no political input. He also pointed out that the funding projects involved natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and even humanities research, all of which were considered based on academic level, academic contributions and academic achievements.
Huang continued to say that in order to integrate into the overall national development, the RGC recently reviewed the theme research plan and added elements of the national 14th Five-Year Plan to it. Therefore, after being approved by the Education Bureau, the theme research plan will add "quantum technology" next year. and "Integrated Circuits".
In addition, this year the RGC selected a total of 8 outstanding research proposals, and the 8 projects received a total of 306 million yuan in funding. The RGC will provide 270 million yuan of them, and the remaining 36 million yuan will be provided by the relevant universities through matching.
Among them, the "Edge Artificial Intelligence Chip on Resistive Memory" project, co-operated by HKU, CUHK, CityU and HKUST, plans to use emerging memristive devices for memory computing, innovate the microelectronics implementation platform for next-generation edge AI, and reduce the cost of energy consumption.
The coordinator and associate professor of the University of Hong Kong, Huang Yi, said that the successful research and development can improve the energy efficiency by 1,000 times, and the versatility is also large. For example, in the future, smart watches can be charged once every few months, and 24-hour remote monitoring of patients' conditions can also be realized.
This year, the plan is for the first time to fund the higher-risk Hong Kong University to study the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in a one-year format; other funding projects include "Multidisciplinary Collaboration to Address the Global Public Health Threat of Highly Virulent and Multidrug-resistant Klebsiella Pneumoniae" ", "Improving clinical diagnosis and treatment strategies for liver cancer by elucidating key mechanisms and transforming research results", "Towards carbon neutrality: Catalyzing H2O and CO2 as green resource carriers", "Analyzing the relationship between air pollution and public health II Realization Transformative Air Quality Management”, “Research on the Interactive Intelligent Internet of Cross-Border Logistics Hubs in the Greater Bay Area” and “Intelligent Healthcare-Grade Extended Reality Research Institute”.
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