Bulletin No. 2, 2024

The human and the machine This approach may sound novel, but the professor explains that it only follows established trends in medicine: “during the Obama administration, the US had already been promoting what they called ‘precision medicine’. So they see that healthcare has to be personalised, and the best way of collecting personal [health] data is to collect it during your daily life”. The “unique human-and-sensor-in-the-loop approach” of Dr. PAI will also allow it to interact with users, and tailor its health advice: although most people are aware of the importance of healthy living, the haziness of the term means that it can assume different forms to different people; the individualised approach of the AI system will allow users to tackle underlying risk factors according to their own needs. Professor Zhao is eager to point out how Dr. PAI might compliment the healthcare system. Although citizens of Hong Kong can access medical attention with relative ease, this is not the case for many people around the world. “For areas that have very limited hospital resources,” she says, “it's very difficult to arrange an appointment with doctors, and in Hong Kong, this is also the case in public hospitals. So in between the appointment, you can have some sort of intermediate method to understand your situation, and adjust if necessary.” Keeping the faith in the next generation For Professor Zhao, developing projects like Dr. PAI for general use is a natural extension for academics. “When I was in MIT,” she says, “the coolest thing among students was not which professor had published a paper or whatever. It was whoever had started a company, received investment, and gotten a very cool product.” She feels passionately about the need to turn the fruits of one’s research into something that can help the community and humanity at large: “For us, the existence of [research] fields like sensors is because of need: if we cannot deliver anything that can be useful in the end, this field would die! So to keep people having faith in this field, I think we have to have successful commercialisation.” This is an ethos that she has maintained over a decade and a half of research. In her capacity as Vice-Chair (Graduate) for the Department, she oversees a vast cohort of postgraduate students, and supervises a large group of budding academics herself. “When I supervise students, I spend more time on the first-year students, because that's when I encourage them to look for new projects, new directions for their PhD,” she says. She clarifies that she does not cast aspersions on their hopes and dreams, but she is eager for her supervisees to “slowly understand the value of research”, and how it might be turned towards practical purposes. “Impossible is fine,” she says, “because if something's very useful, maybe you can do your impossible projects! But we should also analyse, from the scientific side, whether it's theoretically possible.” 33