by Natasha Arora | Photo credits: Insight Robotics, TecHKU | 6 August 2015

As part of TecHKU’s innovative tech leaders series, we talked to Rex Sham of Insight Robotics Limited (IRL), a “disruptive” robotics firm based in Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks, about the technologies behind his firefighting robots, big data, and his startup journey.

We might find it hard to appreciate certain technologies that we don’t personally use in everyday life, but technology like that developed by Insight Robotics play a huge role in safeguarding people, infrastructure and environment.

Insight Robotics has been growing ever since it was co-founded by Rex Sham and Kevin Chan in 2009. Their work has been recognised worldwide. In February 2015, the Hong Kong-based startup was named Entrepreneur of the Year at the IBM SmartCamp Global Finals.

The robotics startup relies on three main technologies:

1. Insight Globe

Simply put, Insight Globe is an advanced form of geographic information system as it incorporates structured data and updates itself in real time. This platform enables accurate threat detection on its grid-based map.

2. Wildfire Detection Robots

The wildfire detection robots use “advanced thermal imaging sensors” to detect forest fires within a five-kilometre radius. It can detect a heat source that is as small as two square meters. Moreover, it is connected to Insight Globe thus, precisely locating the source of the fire.

3. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

The unmanned aerial vehicle is equipped with a number of sensors and cameras. The long wave infrared sensor can detect changes in temperature, while the visible light camera takes high-resolution images with geo-tagging. Lastly, the crop camera can monitor crop health by detecting photosynthesis activity.

These three technologies are deployed in combination for agricultural surveying and mapping, plantation management, wildfire detection, and pipeline and electrical fault detection.

What has IRL essentially done?
It found loopholes in existing technology and filled the gaps. The basic and older wildfire detection systems provide a warning once the fire is on its way to becoming a full-fledged disaster, and they can take up to two hours to do so!

To IRL, a timely response is the most important factor in countering a forest fire. Their wildfire detection robots aim to detect the fire minutes after it breaks out to minimise losses and destruction, and pin-point its location using Inside Globe.

The UAVs are deployed to conduct aerial surveys of plantations and agricultural land. The data generated on soil fertility, crop status, quality of soil, etc. can be analysed and used by plantation managers and farmers to ensure high yields, prevent pest infestation and prevent disasters from striking. Additionally, the sensors in the UAV can detect “abnormal heat levels” due to pipeline leakages and corrosion and help prevent industrial disasters.

Thus, as Sham explained, “for many years, monitoring large areas of land was a manual, expensive and time-consuming process in emerging and developed markets alike. For the first time ever, entire industries such as forestry and agriculture, are able to use automated technology to gain the insights they need to protect our world’s natural resources and infrastructure quickly, easily and cost-effectively.”

Era of Big Data

UAVs and wildfire detection robots collect data and provide “insights” in real time to enable better decision making on the course of future action. Furthermore, a diverse range of data leads to identification and implementation of a solution that has been customised to suit the exact needs of the problem.

According to Sham, in the future, data will be mainly collect by machines and analysed by computers. He believes that “insights can be automatically generated by fusing different high-quality data sets.” He adds: “Each new dataset collected helps make our technology and the underlying algorithms even more intelligent, therefore resulting in the highest quality and most relevant data possible for our customers.”
He does mention that the role of humans is still essential, “Humans and robots will work together as humans still need to define the data needs and parameters and act on the data.”

Big data has tremendously helped the private and public sector. Now governments can make better decisions and companies can work more efficiently. For Rex, all these benefits come with added concerns: “The big question around big data is: who will own the data? This is why data privacy and security are very important.”

He emphasised the need to be pragmatic and reasonable: “Don’t be afraid to take risks and change direction but also understand your personal limits. Push forward and fast with your venture, but at the same time, know when to stop, reflect and reset.”

Students interested in internship or career opportunities with Insight Robotics can visit their website here.

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Natasha Arora

Social Sciences + journalism student at HKU. Loves to travel and lives on pop music. Major foodie, climate change advocate, and wannabe workaholic.

Latest posts by Natasha Arora (see all)

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As part of TecHKU’s innovative tech leaders series, we talked to two tech representatives at Credit Suisse about the employment of cloud computing, intra-business communications, and security technologies and corporate culture.

Credit Suisse. You may have seen this company sponsoring art and cultural events, classic cars, sports, and even professional tennis player Roger Federer – it is also considered a reputable global financial institution. Established in 1856, the bank specialises in private banking and investment management and boasts offices in over 50 countries with over 46,400 employees.

“Private banking” and “investment banking” might not make much sense to many students outside of the Faculty of Business and Economics, but Credit Suisse and other similar companies offer plenty of opportunity for students from STEM fields. TecHKU’s interview with Lawrence Beck and Ofer Halevi aims to shed some light on why Credit Suisse should be of importance to HKU students.

Lawrence Beck is a Managing Director of Credit Suisse in the Information Technology division, based in Hong Kong. He leads the Investment Banking Technology team in Asia Pacific. In addition, he has responsibility as the Head of Equities Technology and Head of Fixed Income Technology for the Asia Pacific region. Lawrence holds a BA degree in Mathematics and Quantitative Economics from Tufts University.

Ofer Halevi is a Vice President and Technical Fellow of Credit Suisse’s IB and CCT IT division, based in Hong Kong. He is Equity Derivatives IT APAC Architect. Ofer joined Credit Suisse in December 2009 from UBS. Over his 23 years in the software industry, Ofer has worked on a wide array of technology projects including quoting and execution platforms, risk management, advanced visualization platforms, reinsurance trading platforms, mobile application development platforms, artificial intelligence systems, and cross-platform rapid application development systems. Ofer’s specialist technical areas are User Interface and User Experience design and development, Advanced Data Visualization, Web Technologies and Software Architecture.

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Nayantara Bhat

Second-year journalism student at HKU. Book-lover. Food-lover. Music-lover. Chronic procrastinator.

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• The Quartz App: My New Favourite Thing - February 23, 2016
• Six Questions for Credit Suisse - June 19, 2015

Slack is no doubt one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley today. Founded less than two years ago, the workplace collaboration startup is valued at 2.8 billion dollars in its newest round of funding. Shortly after launching its successful web-based work-collaboration application, Slack released desktop and mobile applications for multiple platforms at such fast pace that it made everyone wonder how they did it. In fact, Slack has leveraged web technologies to develop these hybrid applications on different platforms.

Dropbox is another example of a fast-growing startup that has developed a hybrid app. Maxime Belanger, who joined their engineering team when there were only 20 employees, shared how he used web technology to build their hybrid desktop application at the World Internet Developer Summit 2015 two weeks ago.

“What do I do at Dropbox? I enjoy creating new ways for people to work together!” said Belanger. Using web technologies to build hybrid desktop applications makes the development process and product iteration a lot faster. His sharing covered the following three aspects:

• What is a hybrid app? How is it different from a traditional application?
• Why are hybrid apps so popular and powerful today?
• How do you choose the technology to build hybrid apps?

What a Hybrid App is

Before introducing the concept of hybrid apps, we first need to know what web apps and native apps are.

A native app is an application coded for a specific platform such as MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, and usually provides high performance and a high degree of reliability. It has access to features provided by the operating system. For instance, a native app on MacOS can use functionalities like pop-up animation and high-resolution image rendering provided by MacOS. In addition, some native apps can be used without internet connection. However, since a native app is tied to a specific platform, developing native apps for multiple platforms implies more effort is required to develop and maintain different codebases for all supported platforms.

A web app, as the name implies, is an application that runs in a web browser with internet. Web apps are written in browser-supported programming languages (such as HTML, CSS, Javascript) and then rendered by the browser, supporting cross-platform compatibility. Web apps require Internet connection to download the application on runtime, which makes it easy to iterate, distribute, update, and maintain the application.

So what is a hybrid app? “A hybrid app contains both native and web elements that co-exist to form a cohesive user interface. The experience is just seamless!” A hybrid app is developed based on the native platform but uses a “webview” to load some pages dynamically from the internet. In this way, the hybrid app not only has access to high performing features provided by the specific platform, but also enjoys the cross-platform compatibility and code reuse for those pages loaded in webview.

Dropbox, which has just one codebase written in Python, supports several desktop applications for Windows, Mac, and Linux. “Probably most people don’t realize that when you launch the Dropbox desktop application and see a login page, it’s actually loaded as a web page!” said Belanger. This way, Dropbox does not need to re-implement the login functionality for another platform.

Why hybrid apps are so popular and powerful today

Technology research firm Gartner predicts that by 2016, 50% of mobile apps will be hybrid. Data from Vision Mobile last summer showed that 42% of North American mobile developers were already using HTML, CSS, or JavaScript today in some fashion.

According to Belanger, hybrid apps help save time and money. since developers are able to write the core code once and run the application on multiple platform without much effort.

That said, developing hybrid apps is one of the cheapest ways to target the desktop market where there are billions of potential consumers.

The dynamically-loaded webview also avoids the troubles of releasing, updating, and maintaining client applications brought by traditional desktop applications. Hybrid app makes it faster to ship code and there’s no need to release new client applications.

While web apps are usually accessed via web bookmarks and displayed together with browser tools and menus irrelevant to the app, Belanger said a hybrid app is a “first-class” application which enjoys its own application icon, elevated privileges, and can run tasks in the background.

Yet hybrid apps also come with disadvantages. A page displayed in a hybrid app’s webview sometimes doesn’t rival that of a native app. For instance, the webview cannot use platform-specific pop-ups or tray icons provided by MacOS. Failure to customize the design leads to worse user experience.

Since the webview relies on the browser to render and run, the application usually is not as high-performing and reliable compared to a native app (especially on mobile platforms).

Choosing the technology to build a hybrid app

Hybrid apps are not a technical approach to all scenarios. The following three aspects shall be investigated before adopting the approach:

First, choose the right web engine that powers your webview. There exists many powerful web engines now – Chromium Embedded Framework, Qt, MacGap, Node-Webkit, and WKWebView. The best candidate shall be well-maintained by the developer community, standard-compliant, secure, and high-performing. Chromium Embedded Framework is one of the most popular candidates, while Dropbox uses Qt and WebKit.

Second, choose webviews wisely. Some applications encapsulate the entire application in a window-like webview (such as Slack and Spotify), while some display just part of the application in webview (such as Microsoft Office and Dropbox). The golden rule is that, a webview is great for user interface that changes frequently.

Third, enhance the web engine if necessary. For most of applications, existing web engines are good enough. But sometimes, the tech team shall add features to the web engine when more functionalities are needed (such as file system access).

Read on:

1. Ionic: Framework for Hybrid Mobile App
2. Appcelerator Titanium: Build native mobile apps from a single code base

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Eric Haibin Lin

Computer Science student at HKU. Passionate technologist. Codeaholic.

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• The Hidden Tech Recipe behind Slack and Dropbox - June 1, 2015

Michelle Sun, the founder and CEO of First Code Academy.

It was until one life-changing experience had Sun completely immersed in the technology industry. It was a 12-week women-only coding camp at Hackbright Academy in the United States.

The life-changing lesson

Sun said the camp and its learning environment was tremendously helpful to her. “I would never have gone to a course if it’s like a regular boot camp with 10 percent women and 90 percent guys,” she said.

She was very much thankful to Christian Fernandez, the CTO and instructor at Hackbright Academy, for his teachings. He has helped students go from having zero programming knowledge to landing a job at Facebook after 12 weeks — even Sun herself proceeded to the final round of interview.

For nine months before the camp, Sun tried to pick up coding by reading books but was unable to figure it out. Fernandez has helped her piece things together and explained how each piece work.

Fernandez had been working as an engineer at Silicon Valley for many years. The local industry is very often commented as a “white-male” place. He always felt the gender balance of the industry is a gap that needs to be fixed.

“I think it’s really inspiring that he has a vision to fix something,” said Sun, “[he] fixes a problem in his community and starts up this business that has impacted so many people.”

Starting her Venture

Photos and names of students are displayed on the wall at First Code Academy’s office in Wan Chai.

Sun had learnt a lesson from her previous experience in helping a friend in a start-up that eventually failed. She felt more vigilant about financial planning and risk controlling ever since.

Nonetheless, she felt fortuitous for having this business model for its very minimal start-up cost. She can easily put off a class when it does not recruit enough students. It made her less stressed to constantly fuss over profit and loss.

Being an engineer before has geared her the skills to break down problems. From debugging to tackling business crisis, she thought through problems like a computer scientist.

As an entrepreneur, Sun often has to work on new tasks that she had never done before. “One day I’m looking at finance, the other day I’m teaching curriculum and the next day I’m working on marketing,” she said.

However, being an engineer before has somehow limited her chances to meet and interact with people. She worked remotely with her teammates from all over the world. That made her hard to know her teammates well or work with them very closely.

At First Code Academy, she found her major fulfillment from interacting and talking to students. “I don’t usually think of myself as the teacher, but actually their partner to help build their products,” she said, “I think that part really makes me happy.” She blissed out seeing her students succeed.

“Teaching is one of the best ways to learn,” said Sun. Being an engineer is about getting really competent at a skill that the company product requires to develop. But as a teacher at First Code Academy, learning is not limited to a specific knowledge but multiple products that her students are creating. “I’m learning broader things now whereas before, I learnt one thing very deep,” she said.

The female engineers

Sun too returned solutions to the gender balance issue in Hong Kong technology industry. She is now the co-founder of Women Who Code HK and technology advisory council member at the Women’s Foundation.

“Having more diversity always helps,” said Sun. She gave Pinterest as an example, an application that allow users to compile any information they dig up from the Internet. 70 percent of its users are female. When a company is building a product for some middle-aged mothers, the team certainly needs more perspectives than just a gang of white men. “I think it’s better for everyone, like you get sit next to someone that is from a different background,” she said.

Sun said one of the bright sides of being a woman in Tech industry is that there is lots of support offered only for females. For instance, Women Who Code is a global community that involves over 20 cities in the world now. It is all volunteer-led groups that assemble female engineers together.

At First Code Academy, girls do not take up a large percentage in Sun’s classes either. In general, girls’ percentage in a class is around 15. In classes of younger age, the percentage can go up to 20 or 30.

Sun explained that there is an apparent shift of mindset when girls progress from primary school to secondary school. “I don’t know what our society tells them,” said Sun, “they suddenly feel that they have to do girls’ things.”

Sun thinks boys and girls do not have significant difference cognitive-wise. However, young girls do concentrate better and pay more attention to detail than young boys.

In September, First Code Academy collaborated with TecHKU to hold Girls4Tech, an event that aims to trigger secondary school girls’ interest in computer science.

“I think that was one of the best sessions that I had, teaching a big class.” Sun said. She was impressed that everyone was able to complete their own mobile applications in the end.

Students drafted on glass surface before typing codes on computers.

Sun said children should not just stay at the receiving end of information, but go beyond creation. With coding, children can easily design useful applications for their family and friends. “We open up the door for them and they can dig deeper to learn different concepts and languages,” she said.

Sun clarifies that coding is not only for people who are good at Mathematics. Being logical is actually the confounding factor that leads to both Mathematical sense and coding ability. “That’s a huge misconception,” she said, “the only math I’ve ever done in my previous job as a full-time engineer is like plus or minus, and then the computer does everything else for us.”

Seeking like-minded talents

When it comes to hiring, Sun is looking for someone with potential and an adventurous attitude. Start-ups are fast changing and everyone in the team does different things everyday. “We want people that can like throw them into the water and learn to swim,” she said “it’s not an environment for everyone but I think some people really like that.”

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Michelle Sun has given up the mainstream for greater deeds. Being in the minority of the industry had never held her back from pursuing a career of her real passion.

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Michelle Wong

Michelle Wong is a journalism freshman at HKU. She loves travelling, loves music, and is fascinated by the state of art.

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• Michelle Sun — Against all odds - February 4, 2015

Hong Kong – You might not remember what your cholesterol level was in 2009, but the National Security Agency might. And you won’t be able to sue your doctor for it.

In a seminar held by the University of Hong Kong Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, Director of Centre of Genomics and Policy Bartha M. Knoppers urged fellow authorities in medical ethics to beware of challenges new data technologies pose to doctor-patient confidentiality.

Bartha explains at HKU what should be done to minimize the risks of using the cloud for medical research. Read more about Bartha here.

Digitization of medical research

Modern biomedical research is often international and collaborative. Its data combines medical, demographic, genetic and environmental factors. Computations of such data require the use cloud computing due to its sheer size and complexity.

Numbers of pan-cancer analysis use public commercial cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft because it’s lower in cost, more environmentally friendly, and accessible remotely.

To ensure the privacy of participants-patients while maintaining efficiency, one may use a Hybrid Cloud, where sensitive workloads are processed in a private cloud infrastructure while less sensitive workloads are run in a public cloud infrastructure.

Big Data and Big Brother

Big Data analysis is a recent phenomenon with its terms of service still underdeveloped. Current legal regulations in computing medical Big Data in the ‘clouds’ are as nebulous as a literal cloud.

In Canada, where Bartha Knoppers serves as a chair at McGill University, the government enacted a general law outlining how personal medical data should be collected, used and if necessary, disclosed. Legal precedents favor personal privacy over competing legislations. It does not interfere with, however: Law of evidence, Power of a court of tribunal to compel testimony or regulatory activities of a body of a health profession or social workers.

“There is no contract that prevents governments from encroaching into our data. You’re not totally protected,” said the speaker.

Catch me if you can

The cloud servers cross borders and hence national jurisdiction. A Canadian citizen’s medical privacy cannot be protected by Canadian laws if his or her data is flown across the Atlantic Ocean and computed in a server located in Munich.

“It will take five years or more to create a governance system that is internationally recognized and capable of handling the terms of service,” she said. Meanwhile, the presentation offered a few advices to follow before signing a medical consent form: 1. Ensure that you can retrieve your genomic data 2. Clarify the terms of usage 3. Keep a mirror copy.

She referenced the Edward Snowden scandal as a wake up call. “We don’t fully understand the power and utility of the system… Researchers need to keep wary when they are bargaining with these giants.”

• About
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Natasha Arora

Social Sciences + journalism student at HKU. Loves to travel and lives on pop music. Major foodie, climate change advocate, and wannabe workaholic.

Latest posts by Natasha Arora (see all)

• How pinpointing value-adding solutions is key to Insight Robotics’s success - August 6, 2015
• New Ultrafast Aluminium-Ion Battery - May 23, 2015