Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme

Our Research Excellence

The Computer Science Department of HKBU is committed to quality of teaching as well as research excellence over the years. Currently, the Department has over 20 academic staff members, including 3 IEEE Fellows and 6 IEEE Senior Members. All of the faculty members have PhD degrees awarded by renowned universities in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong.

The research output of the Department has been strong. Academic staff of the Department have regularly published in the prestigious journals such as:

ACM Transactions on Database Systems ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology ACM Transactions on the Web Algorithmica Artificial Intelligence Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent System Communications of the ACM IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology IEEE Transactions on Communications IEEE Transactions on Computers IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing IEEE Transactions on Multimedia IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Management Information Systems Quarterly Pattern Recognition Very Large Database (VLDB) Journal

In addition, the academic staff present their research results in major international conferences such as CHI, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICDE, ICML, IJCAI, INFOCOM, KDD, NIPS, SIGMOD, and VLDB.

For more details about our department, please refer to our presentation slides on Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme.

Top-Class Facilities

The Department has several research laboratories with specialized hardware and software to support research in different sub-disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML), Big Data Analytics and Management (BDAM), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Distributed Systems and Networking (DSAN), etc. There are about 90 dedicated machines (BigDATA systems, GPU Cluster, and Research Machines etc.) for providing high performance computing resources. In addition, a PC cluster with 50+ nodes is setup for supporting research. This cluster runs MOSIX which extends Linux (openSUSE) to manage the running processes on clusters. For more details, please refer to Research Facilities.

Additional Support for Research-related Activities

On top of the fellowship award offered by RGC, our department provides additional scholarships for successful HKPFS awardees, as well as additional support for carrying out research-related activities such as attending overseas conferences and joining exchange programmes / attachments in world-renowned universities. In addition, Postdoctoral Research Fellowships will be awarded to outstanding PhD graduates for furthering their research in top overseas universities.

	HKPFS during 4-year study
	Offered by RGC	Additional Support offered by HKBU and our Department	Total Amount
Stipend (tax-free)	HK $1,011,600	Additional HK $1,399,400 for 4-year study subject to satisfactory performance	HK $2,400,000
Extra Award	NIL	HK $92,000 (HK$40,000 in the 1st year and HK$26,000 in the subsequent 2 years)	HK $92,000
Tuition Waiver	NA	First year tuition waiver; tuition waivers for subsequent years of study are subject to satisfactory academic progress
Overseas Exchanges / Attachments and Research-related Activities	HK $42,000	Plus HK $60,000 for student's 4-year study period	HK $102,000

Potential Research Topics for 2026 Admission

Our faculty members work on a broad range of research topics in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML), Big Data Analytics and Management (BDAM), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) and Distributed Systems and Networking (DSAN). While some potential research topics for 2026 Admission are listed below, please feel free to contact our faculty members for discussion of the PhD research plan.

• Advanced Machine Learning in Health Risk Prediction and Mapping: Theories and Applications (Jiming Liu, Yang Liu, et al.)
• Efficient Graph Search Algorithms for Public-Private Social Networks (Xin Huang et al.)
• Efficient Machine Learning via Understanding Statistical Structures (Yifan Chen et al.)
• Empathetic and Personalized Conversational AI for Promoting Human Well-Being (Li Chen, Yucheng Jin, et al.)
• Face Anti-spoofing to Combat Mask Attacks: a Remote Photoplethysmography Approach (P C Yuen et al.)
• Federated Online Learning and Optimization: Data Freshness, Model Robustness, and Communication Efficiency (Juncheng Wang et al.)
• Learning Dynamic Patient Representations from Multi-Model Electronic Health Record Data Using a Deep Tensor Factorization Approach (William K. Cheung et al.)
• Lip-password for Personal Identity Verification (Yiu-ming Cheung et al.)
• LLM-based Generative Graph Analytics (Xin Huang et al.)
• Novel Queries and Applications on Large Graphs (Byron Choi et al.)
• Robust Information Fusion and its Applications in Video Surveillance (P C Yuen et al.)
• Shapelet Discovery for Time Series Classification (Byron Choi et al.)
• Symbolic Human Motion Programming and Style Disentanglement (Jie Chen et al.)
• Trustworthy Machine Learning and Reasoning with Noisy Data (Bo Han et al.)
• Towards Clinically Accurate Medical Image Report Generation Using Deep Generative Models (William K. Cheung et al.)
• Towards Distributed Immersive Tele-presence – Dynamic Human Shape and Environment Modelling (Jie Chen et al.)
• Vector Similarity Search in High-Dimensional Spaces (Jianliang Xu et al.)
• When Learned Index Meets Blockchain: Design, Algorithms, and Performance Evaluation (Jianliang Xu et al.)
• Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptation for Video Surveillance in Large-scale Camera Networks (P C Yuen et al.)
• Wireless Sensor Networks for Real-time Healthcare Monitoring (Y.W. Leung et al.)