CityUHK × HHRIForging a Seamless Bridge Connecting Industry, Academia, Research, and Applications

The partnership between City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and Hon Hai Research Institute (HHRI) began in 2021. Together, both sides not only advanced the real-world application of academic research but also provided authentic testing environments, accelerating talent development and resource integration.

Professor Jianping Wang, Dean of the College of Computing and Chair Professor of Computer Science at CityUHK, notes that HHRI moves beyond short-term project sponsorship to build long-term research partnerships. By creating joint research platforms where both parties jointly identify research topics, they integrate industry needs directly into academic inquiry, ensuring that research directions align with market dynamics.

Additionally, both parties have established a joint supervisory committee that regularly evaluates key performance indicators. This structure ensures research outcomes remain both academically rigorous and commercially relevant. Regular exchanges among engineers foster cross-disciplinary talent fluent in both market demands and engineering practice, accelerating the path to commercialization.

Synergies through Joint R&D

As the collaboration deepened, CityUHK and HHRI established a Joint Research and Development Center in June 2024. The Center has already yielded powerful synergies with multiple key achievements.

First, in autonomous driving and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, the Center's self-developed autonomous mini trucks have completed testing at Foxconn's Longhua campus, with stable communication between vehicles and roadside equipment.

Furthermore, in the field of AI, the Center has published numerous papers at top international conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). It has also achieved outstanding results in international competitions.

For instance, the ModeSeq algorithm achieved second place in the 2024 CVPR Waymo Motion Prediction Challenge. Professor Shiqi Wang, professor of computer science at CityUHK, explains that in autonomous driving technology, any data latency can lead to serious safety consequences. Therefore, both teams worked to minimize data processing delays while ensuring data quality.

Additionally, BehaviorGPT won the 2024 Waymo Open Dataset Challenge, while QCNet has dominated the Argoverse Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting Competition for two consecutive years.

In cybersecurity, the Center has successfully published papers at four top security conferences. Research published at USENIX Security 2024 identified attack methods targeting autonomous driving trajectory prediction systems. The team's RedRFT and RedTopic frameworks effectively enhance large language model security and are now integrated into FoxBrain, Hon Hai's in-house large language model platform.

In the field of semiconductors and materials, the center used large language models and machine learning to successfully design and synthesize a new high-stability material, CHDA-Bil5. This material effectively improves ion migration activation energy and enables high-sensitivity response in X-ray detectors.

As for quantum computing, progress is primarily achieved through talent exchanges and joint simulation research, gradually building results that chart a clear path from theoretical exploration to experimental validation.

Setting a New Benchmark for Industry-Academia Collaboration

Working closely with the AI Research Center, Professor Shiqi Wang observes that due to efficient and flexible communication, their collaboration is highly complementary. HHRI, leveraging its corporate background, provides valuable insights from macro-level direction to micro-level algorithms while maintaining a deep understanding of industry needs and frontline application scenarios. On the other hand, CityUHK's research team focuses on algorithm optimization. “It's like the relationship between fish and water,” he says.

Looking forward, Professor Wang hopes the Joint Research and Development Center can transcend traditional project collaboration models to establish an innovation ecosystem that seamlessly connects industry, academia, research, and application. He envisions it becoming a birthplace and accelerator for cutting-edge technologies, producing prototypes or patents with industry impact in core areas each year, achieving successful technology transfer and product integration. Both sides also aim to establish joint talent development mechanisms, transforming the Center into a hub for cultivating interdisciplinary talent who understand both technology and industry.

The collaboration between CityUHK and HHRI demonstrates how academic innovation can seamlessly connect with industrial practice and sets a new benchmark for industry-academia co-creation in the technology sector.