The Numbers
– Two-thirds of all engineering jobs in the United States today are filled by men
– Women account for just 6 per cent of chief executives in the top 100 US tech companies
– Women contribute to just 1.2 percent of open source software and 5 percent of patents.
– Only 3 percent of tech startups are formed by women (Kauffman Foundation).

Why?

Over the years, the trend has always been that a significantly larger male population holds engineering or technology related university degrees.

girls4tech @HKU2014

So when a couple of HKU engineering students sit together to discuss what we can do to encourage more girls to discover their love for technology, we came up with the idea of an event for secondary school girls. We want them to realize their potential and inspire them to dream about changing the world with technology.

We have been lucky to have the support of the HKU Faculty of Engineering and our sponsor Microsoft. Through a cyberport event, we have also found an organising partner, First Code Academy, a school that pioneers kid’s coding in Hong Kong.

Event Time: 13 September 2014, 10:00 – 17:30
Event Venue: The University of Hong Kong Centennial Campus LG 07-08
And we are calling for volunteers at http://girls4tech.wordpress.com/#volunteer
Download Our Poster

Speakers and Guests:

Joey Lam Deputy Government Chief Information Officer (Policy and Community) Joey is one of the top IT officer in the Hong Kong Government and has always been a proud advocate of ICT development in Hong Kong. She is passionate about issues such as open data and obviously, women in tech.

Michelle Sun Founder of First Code Academy A former banker who realized she wants to be changing the world with technology after working with companies like Tencent and Alibaba at Goldman Sachs. She has since graduated from a coding bootcamp and worked as an engineer at Facebook. Now running First Code Academy full time.

The HKU Journal of Technology has always been more than just a student blog. From now on, think of us as an incubator of all activities related to tech at HKU. Girls4Tech and The Future of Technology Conference we had last year are just the beginning. If you have a good idea, you should drop us a message.

• About
• Latest Posts

Donald Lam

Editor in Chief
A second year student in Computer Science at HKU. He owns a Nokia phone and is a bit of a Microsoft fanboy in denial.
dlamty@gmail.com

Latest posts by Donald Lam (see all)

• Announcing Girls4Tech @HKU2014 - September 7, 2014
• CloudNG: the ease and power of a personal server showcased - June 17, 2014
• Smartwatches: Not The Next Big Thing Yet - March 22, 2014

I met Wilson Chandra, a graduating senior, in the Composite Building Mac lab and he showed me his final year project (FYP). I recognized it immediately because it was one of the projects that received honorary mention in the annual FYP competition, getting the third place overall.

You can tell CloudNG is Wilson’s baby. He talks about it most fervorously. CloudNG is basically a personal and privately hosted cloud. It is the software and interface for a multifunctional server that you can set up at home. Imagine a dropbox clone but instead of uploading your files to the servers of some company, your files can stay at your home. Here are a couple of screenshots of the CloudNG webapp:

It syncs your files:

And your contacts:

Your calendar:

And your bookmarks:

This may not be the newest of ideas but the design and execution of CloudNG is beautifully done. The interface is clean, gorgeous and looks suspiciously similar to the dropbox web portal so it is familiar and easy to use.

Built with a standard open source Apache server, the MySQL database is so widely supported that you can sync from practically any device or service. CloudNG therefore inherits great compatibility and the team built a detailed user guide on how any user can quickly sync up the data from their PCs, Macs, tablets or phones. You can even type in the address in the file explorer or finder of any PC/Mac, and your files would show up as if they are locally stored after a password prompt.

I asked him how long did it take for him and his teammate to build it, only to get the hilarious response of “We procrastinated until almost January…”, so only three months of after school hours.

You can actually sign up for a 1GB test drive of the CloudNG service right now. This is hosted on a faculty server and could be taken down in later years, but you do get to play with it. (link)

The CloudNG team imagines that in the future, we would all have a little black box at home with CloudNG installed, hooked up to the internet and streaming our files anywhere we want them.

There is still a lot the team wants to add to CloudNG. Streaming media, running third party apps, more social network functions, enabling an online document editor, etc. It will look very mature and poised to take on real world competitors soon. You can see a detailed comparison of the current functions of CloudNG versus current products here.

Contact the developers:
Wilson Chandra: admin@wilsonchandra.com
Yonatan Nugraha Toemali: ynt1993@connect.hku.hk

• About
• Latest Posts

Donald Lam

Editor in Chief
A second year student in Computer Science at HKU. He owns a Nokia phone and is a bit of a Microsoft fanboy in denial.
dlamty@gmail.com

Latest posts by Donald Lam (see all)

• Announcing Girls4Tech @HKU2014 - September 7, 2014
• CloudNG: the ease and power of a personal server showcased - June 17, 2014
• Smartwatches: Not The Next Big Thing Yet - March 22, 2014

The not-so-secret doorway is usually wide open. No, you are still not supposed to waltz in uninvited.

While the place may seem like a factory, members in the team personalize their space.

Chim Lee explains the Electronics sphere of Robotics. Each circuit board may take upto 5-7 hrs to solder. One Robot has at least 30-50 of such boards which add up to a lot of hardwork and patience.

The team joined the Robocon competition this year. The theme of the 2014 Robocon is parenthood, so all tasks simulate playground activities for children with the help of a parent robot.

The team made exact prop replicas to prepare for the tasks:

A baby robot the team made is required to climb up to the top of this ladder.

Another task: The baby robot is required to walk on the pole walk set from one to the other till it reaches the end.

In this task the parent robot will put the baby on the swing and push it forward. The baby will need to maintain balance.

At the back, is a see-saw that will have a similar parent & baby robots interaction.

By the expression on that box; someone definitely had a burst of creativity and put in some time to decorate the 3D printer in the lab.

Chim Lee attaching together newly printed 3D pieces. The wonder of 3D printing: assembly complete in less than a minute.

We played with this 3D printed clockface.

A software simulation of a quadcopter on the powerful Gazebo software on Linux. Gazebo can do all kinds of robotics simulation, even the DRC Atlas uses it to test run new code.

In a gazebo simulation, the quadcopter detects the impending object and turns around automatically.

When the going gets tough, 24-7 McDonalds rescues the day!

The M2 Robotics lab is funded by the Mechanical Engineering Department. McDonalds takeaway not included.

• About
• Latest Posts

Vaibhav Bahadur

A second year student in Computer Engineering at HKU. The kid philosopher, an avid reader, guitar enthusiast and cartoonist.
bahadur.vaibhav@gmail.com

Latest posts by Vaibhav Bahadur (see all)

• A Tour of the HKU M2 Robotics Team Lab - March 30, 2014
• When UBS Holds a Competition - February 5, 2014

• About
• Latest Posts

Donald Lam

Editor in Chief
A second year student in Computer Science at HKU. He owns a Nokia phone and is a bit of a Microsoft fanboy in denial.
dlamty@gmail.com

Latest posts by Donald Lam (see all)

• Announcing Girls4Tech @HKU2014 - September 7, 2014
• CloudNG: the ease and power of a personal server showcased - June 17, 2014
• Smartwatches: Not The Next Big Thing Yet - March 22, 2014

Smartwatches are all the buzz these days. With the announcement of an official android wearable SDK from Google, we can all expect even more of them cropping up around. The question is, will people really buy them?

Samsung Galaxy Gears I, Pebble and Emopulse Smile

A recent proposition I have heard was: maybe it is time to move functionalities away from the phone to wearables. Gadgets can share the workload, right? After all, we are always running out of juice on our gadgets that tries to do too much.

I think this line of discussion is pointless when in a very near future, smartphones and smartwatches will essentially be the same thing in two form factors. Think flip phones vs sliders vs candy bars. Or tablets vs PCs.

I would say the true goal of innovation has never been divergence. Divergence is only out of necessity. It has always been empowerment, convergence, and replacement.

The Right Form Factor (According to me)

Therefore, for smartwatches to survive, they MUST have the ambition to overthrow smartphones. Basially, we don’t need watches. We need wearable smartphones.

We need to see more products in the category of Emopulse Smile. Or even something similar to a sleeve, or a medieval forearm armor guard.

As the rise of phablets told us, people crave big screens. We have fat fingers and poor eyesight. A tiny screen wrapped in an ugly square awkwardly attached onto our wrists in the least ergonomical way would not do.

Ending Note: Glocalization is Slow For Many Other Embedded Inventions

Intel’s recent debut of the Edison chip and Google’s purchase of Nest made me rethink smart home appliances. Not a new idea exactly.

In the US, they are everywhere. But in most parts of Asia, even in Hong Kong, if I wanted to get an expensive weight scale or a pet monitor that pairs up with my smartphone, I couldn’t unless I ship them in from the US. If I wanted to get a functionless smartwatch though, I can do that in almost any shop here in Hong Kong.

Many more foreign markets in this area are simply underexplored. Here is why: smartwatch makers are big global giants. Makers of bluetooth scales and remotely operated coffee machines are smaller companies and startups, usually based in one country. The former has the global reach to launch everywhere, the latter do not, and their products are not localized to suit alien markets.

For inspirations, check out demohour.com, mainland China’s own Kickstarter clone.

About the Author

Donald Lam Follow @dtylam

Editor in Chief

dlamty@gmail.com

According to Gartner, cloud computing is the fastest growing sector in IT. It has a $100 billion market now and is expected to double by 2016.

Business cloud computing services are typically provided by firms such as Oracle, Microsoft who have the capital to build the hardware infrastructure needed. Companies purchase their services and use their platform to host and run databases and softwares.

Many of the biggest web services in the world use these cloud computing services.For example, Pinterest, Reddit and Netflix use the Amazon cloud to power their services. Most of the big data analysis, simulations and background calculations behind apps are powered this way.

The First Distributed Computing Project: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

BOINC was developed in 2002 by the smart people of UC Berkeley, at first to crowdsource computing power to analyze data from projects to search for extraterrestrial life. Since then, Researchers around the world have been using the BOINC platform to harness processing power from home computers. Everyone can download a copy of the BOINC software tailored for a specific research project onto their PCs and donate their computing power away for scientific research.

The Hong Kong Startup

By now you should be able to guess the business model of Slicify: buying spare computing power from you and me and connecting them to offer cloud computing services.

If you have an awesome Windows PC with the latest Intel processor and gigabytes of RAM but you really only use it for Google, Facebook, YouTube and the occasional assignment, chances are, you can be using it to earn money just by being online with Slicify.

A product originally from Steve’s home office, Slicify did not get to where it is today without help. Slicify joined the Microsoft Bizspark program, which gave the startup free hosting on Windows Azure servers and free licences of all Microsoft software, Visual Studio, Office and present and past Windows editions.

Get Slicify today!

The Slicify Advantage

The biggest advantage of Slicify for people looking to buy computing power is of course, the low cost. You can imagine how by buying computing power from us, the home PC users can be considerably cheaper than buying from hungry corporate giants.

Slicify is not without competitors. It stands out because of its implementation. Simple yet ingenious, Slicify creates a new virtual Linux sandbox with Virtualbox on your PC as a new task comes in.

If you don’t know what Virtualbox is, hit yourself. It is the popular free, open source software that lets you run any second operating system in a “virtual box” on your operating system.

So all processes from the buyers run in a separate operating system on your host PC, which makes it super secure for the selling users.

But this is even better news for the buyers, instead of having to write new code to use a new API when they start using Slicify. The Slicify platform provides processing power through these thousands of remote Linux virtual machines. With Ubuntu Server being used by almost all SMEs these days, companies do not have to write new code and databases to use or migrate to Slicify. This hassle free characteristic is exactly what Slicify has to distance itself from the competition.

Into the Future

Steve also talked about tapping into the graphics processing power in our GPUs in the future. When asked if there are immediate plans in the event, Steve said that the technology is here, but not that popular.

“The challenge we have at the moment is, the virtualization of GPUs is not really there in the mainstream… I will consider it in the future, the next couple of years.”

Considering how many android devices there are in the world, the potential could be huge. We also had a little chat with Slicify over Twitter on whether they will be having mobile plans anytime soon.

So the challenges there are much bigger, the ARM architecture issue in particular. Slicify will probably have to wait until ARM servers becomes popular. (I don’t see that happening any time soon :P)

For now, how the HTC/BOINC Power To Give experimental app do will give us clues as to how the future will unfold for mobile processing power sharing.

About the Author

Donald Lam Follow @dtylam

Editor in Chief

Second Year, Computer Science