An HKU Engineering team has bypassed the von Neumann bottleneck, creating a new computer chip with minimalist architecture that performs complex searches right where the data is stored! The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rise of edge computing are transforming the world, but they’ve also exposed a critical flaw in traditional computer hardware: the slow and energy-consuming data transfer between memory and processors – also known as the von Neumann bottleneck. Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Can Li from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering and the Centre for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits (CASIC) and Dr Guoyun Gao, have used two-dimensional materials to produce a smaller chip that manages to be both fast and power-efficient, achieving record-breaking energy consumption of under 0.1 femtojoules per search per cell, and a latency of just 36 picoseconds – faster than the speed of light. “From an application perspective, search operations are incredibly valuable,” explained Professor Li. “While large-scale commercialisation still requires overcoming engineering challenges in packaging, this research has successfully proven the principle, providing a clear blueprint for next-generation, high-performance AI hardware.” #HKU# #UniversityofHongKong# #Engineering# #Computing# #AI# #香港大學# #港大#

Professor Hengshuang Zhao of HKU’s School of Computing and Data Science has been selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s "35 Innovators Under 35 China”! A frontier pioneer in the field of Physical Intelligence, Professor Zhao has established a general framework for Physical Intelligence spanning two to three dimensions, perception to understanding, and virtual environments to physical reality, helping lay the technical groundwork for visual, spatial, and embodied intelligence worldwide. His achievements include: PSPNet, which has been cited over 20,000 times as a foundational framework for semantic segmentation; The Point Transformer series, which has the potential to reshape 3D backbone networks; The Depth Anything series, which has been integrated into industrial ecosystems such as Apple Core ML, bringing physical spatial perception to billions of intelligent devices; Systems like DriveGPT4 and GPT4Point, which are propelling AI from "perceiving" and "understanding" the world toward "transforming" it. Congratulations to Professor Zhao! 🎉 #hku# #UniversityofHongKong# #HKUExcellence# #computerscience# #tech# #MITTechnologyReview# #TR35China# #港大# #香港大學#

🎓 Global Excellence, Local Leadership🎓 The University of Hong Kong continues to set the standard in higher education, with the newly released 2026 @timeshighered (THE) Subject Rankings confirming our position among the world's elite universities: 🏆 #7# globally in Education Studies 🏅 #1# in Hong Kong for 9 out of 11 ranked subjects 🌍 9 disciplines in the global Top 50