Asian Deans' Forum

The Fifth Asian Deans’ Forum meeting was held at Seoul National University in October 2019.

DATE

October 25, 2019

HOST

Seoul National University

PARTICIPANTS

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, Tsinghua University and The University of Tokyo. UNSW Sydney was welcomed as guest.

REPORT

The Fifth Asian Deans’ Forum was held on October 25, 2019, concurrently with the Asian Deans’ Forum 2019 – Rising Stars Women in Engineering Workshop (RSW), at Seoul National University.

All Deans and representatives of the six member universities of ADF plus UNSW attended the opening event of The Rising Stars Women in Engineering workshop with SNU President Se-jung Oh, the Director of the National Research Foundation of Korea, Prof. Junghye Roh, and other high-level people from SNU’s administration. During the segment “The Rise of Asia’s Engineering Schools”, the seven deans and representatives of the ADF member universities and the co-sponsoring UNSW took the stage and introduced the strengths of their universities.

Dr. Jiao Zhang of THU presented China’s approach to the education of the various engineering degrees. Tsinghua, as one of the cradles of engineering in China, plays a pivotal role in this process. Attracting and providing world-class education, an interdisciplinary “engineering+” approach, and enhancing the global influence are some of the cornerstones of Tsinghua’s approach. The process was further discussed on the example of sustainable development.

Dean Tim Cheng presented HKUST’s plans for the their new Guangzhou campus and Hong Kong’s InnoHK program. Located in the Greater Bay Area, the Guangzhou campus is built for 10-12 thousand students and is connected to HKUST’s Kowloon campus by a 40 minute high-speed train ride. Research focus areas are expected to be AI, IoT, data science, Biotech, environmental science, etc. Dean Cheng is the PI of ACCESS, an AI chip center for emerging smart systems at the InnoHK center.

Prof. Christina Lim focused on NUS’s approach to attract students to engineering disciplines to counter the global trend of declining interest in Engineering. The strategy is based on the four cornerstones scholarships, industry-relevance, experiential learning, and opportunities & flexibility.

Dean Mark Hoffman presented UNSW’s 2025 ABC strategy: A: academic excellence, B: social engagement, and C: global impact. UNSW’s vision on education centers around design-based curricula. A key phrase is “society is the center of engineering” (as opposed to “engineering is the center of society”). As an example, DesignNext was presented.

Dean Okubo from UTokyo talked about defining the future through engineering, focusing on interdisciplinary research, gender equality, and sponsored and social cooperation programs such as funding, sponsored chairs through endowments, social cooperation programs and cooperative programs with national research and development agencies, both funded jointly by different agencies. UTokyo already has an impressive number of success cases in these areas as was evident from Dean Okubo’s presentation.

The ADF members was invited to visit several labs and online/remote lecture facilities, SNU’s makers space (IDEA FACTORY) and entrepreneurship incubation centers such as the GongZone34, a start-up incubator.

TsingHua University volunteered host the next ADF meeting.The date is to be announced.

UNSW Sydney officially joined the ADF member and kindly agreed to host the next RSE (Rising Stars Women in Engineering) workshop.

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