Bulletin Summer‧Autumn 1991

What do we want to be? What w ill distinguish us fr om the other tertiary institutions that also o ffe r a programme o f study in engineering and computer science? The New Faculty of Engineering Omar Wing On 1st August 1991, the Faculty o f Engineering of the Chinese University o f Hong Kong was formally established. W ith a new beginning comes new oppor­ tunities and challenges. Now the faculty must define its mission and find the resources to realize its goals and aspirations. Engineering traces its root to an Electronics minor in the Department o f Physics and Electronics in 1967 in the Faculty o f Science. Three years later, it became the Department of Electronics, which was changed to the Department of Electronic Engineering in 1988. In the same year, the Department of Infor­ mation Engineering was established. Together with the Department o f Computer Science, which was founded in 1973, the three departments were then placed under one adm inistrative unit w ith in the Faculty of Science. In 1991, the Department of Sys­ tems Engineering was added and the Faculty o f Engineering came into being as a separate academic unit of the University. What do we want to be? What w ill distinguish us from the other tertiary institutions that also offer a programme of study in engineering and computer science? There is but one answer: excellence in research and teaching. To achieve excellence, we must have a faculty populated with scholars who are leaders in their fields. We must also have an incentive system that rewards excellence in all that we do. Secondly, we must be selective in choosing research areas and in deciding in which of the many engineering disciplines the faculty w ill offer pro­ grammes o f study. The resources of a university are always limited and public funds should only support education programmes that complement one another. It is interesting to note that over 70 per cent of the industry in Hong Kong is in the service sector. Much of it is in finance, banking, trading, shipping, insurance and the like, and its principal commodity is information. The daily engagement of these industries is the generation, processing, transmission, interpre­ tation, and presentation o f information. The abstrac­ tion o f all that they do could be called the information industry, and the technology that supports it could be called the information technology. In our view, information technology w ill be the key industry for Hong Kong in the years to come. The expanding use o f the computer to process and trans­ m it multilingual information in all forms —voice, data, image, video, over a broad-band telecommunication network linked to all parts of the world —w ill be the driving force behind this industry. Our education mission should therefore be directed to support it. Information technology is rooted in computer science, electronics, communications and system management. These are the disciplines o f the four constituent departments o f the faculty, and the founder of engineering in The Chinese University, our vice- chancellor Prof. Charles K. Kao, had the wisdom, at the very beginning, to link the study of electronics with the use of the computer and with its applications to communications. This principle has guided and w ill continue to guide the development o f engineering in the future. With much encouragement from the University and with substantial support from the University and Polytechnic Grants Committee over the last few years, the staff members have begun to take on more and more research activities. Our goal is to transform the faculty into one in which every staff member is expected to be one o f the best in his/her research field. Over the next few years, we have the oppor­ tunity to add staff in key areas as the faculty expands to meet its obligation to increase the undergraduate enrollment by 60 per cent. W ith a clear vision of what we want to be and with the proper support, the Faculty o f Engineering is well-poised to become a centre of excellence in information technology, in research and in education, to serve the needs of Hong Kong and its industries. □ NEW FACULTIES 8 -