Research Grants Council (RGC) Central Allocation exercise, which is set up to support UGC-funded institutions for group research projects and equipment/library acquisitions, has recently awarded a total of 3.8 million HK Dollars to Computer Science Department of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) as the Principal Investigator to lead a research centre for developing e-Transformation technologies, with The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and E-Business Technology Institute, The University of Hong Kong (ETI-HKU) as their strategic partners. This group research grant is a competitive one. All the proposals have to be reviewed by an international panel and the short-listed ones need to go through second-around interviews. In 2003-04, out of 23 newly submitted proposals, ours is one of the five (and also the only IT related proposal) being funded. This granted project, as depicted in the Research Road Map, is to focus on advanced research in the areas of multi-agent systems, data mining, and grid computing, with scalable applications to e-business and e-learning. It has been highly rated by the reviewers regarding its scholarly merit, commercial potential of research results, relevance to Hong Kong and the suitability of the principal investigator. Let us look at one of the reviewers' comments: "This is what Hong Kong needs: a research centre with strong people conducting cutting edge research work, which is likely to produce influential scholarly publications as well as practical technology with applications to Hong Kong and China."
