Press Releases

HKBU and Wisers sign collaboration agreement to conduct research on big data, AI and digital media

The Department of Computer Science and the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) signed a long-term strategic collaboration agreement with the Wisers AI Lab of Wisers Information Limited (Wisers).

 

The agreement will enable the partners to embark on research in the areas of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital media, as well as the in-depth exploration of data integration and the innovative development of the journalism and media industry in the digital era.

 

HKBU is the first university partner of Wisers in Hong Kong and mainland China. To examine news production and dissemination in the big data and AI era, HKBU and Wisers are collaborating on a series of research projects which focus on the impact of news chatbots and personalised news recommendation systems on news reading habits.

 

The agreement was signed by Professor Rick Wong, the then Vice-President (Research and Development) of HKBU, and Mr Tony Wang, Chief Operating Officer of Wisers. Dr He Chao, Founder and Director of Wisers AI Lab, and Dr Cane Leung, Research Manager of Wisers AI Lab; Professor Huang Yu, Dean of the School of Communication, Dr William Cheung, Head of the Department of Computer Science, Dr Chen Li, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, and Dr Zhang Xinzhi, Assistant Professor of the Department of Journalism at HKBU, also attended the signing ceremony.

 

Under the agreement, Wisers will provide access to a sizable pool of data and relevant advanced technology to HKBU for research purposes. This includes 85 billion data sets from more than 570,000 media sources, and the world's largest Chinese semantic embedding model covering over 13 million Chinese words. Research teams from HKBU's Department of Computer Science and Department of Journalism will collaborate with the Wisers AI Lab to embark on research on different topics, such as the generation of a press criticism index; the relationship between the macro environment, geopolitical and social news on stock market performance; health-related discussions and information diffusion on social media; and the impact of the promulgation of online misinformation. In addition, HKBU and Wisers will endeavour to nurture skilled talent and promote exchange, resulting in a win-win collaboration.

 

The partnership between HKBU and Wisers will help drive in-depth research projects with a data-driven approach, and promote the use of novel ideas and approaches for nurturing journalists and AI-equipped data analysts for the new era, which will bring long-term benefits to the media industry at large.

 

Data Analytics and AI in applications is one of the key research clusters at HKBU. "With this collaboration with Wisers, HKBU will be able to explore more possibilities in cross-disciplinary research," said Professor Rick Wong.

 

Dr He Chao pointed out that in the digital era, technology is changing the way people communicate and interact with each other. The convenience of personalised recommendations and on-demand news consumption leads to side effects, such as the rapid proliferation of fake news and selective reading. "By combining the expertise of Wisers and HKBU in media data, artificial intelligence and journalism, we hope to derive innovative solutions that benefit both news providers and recipients," said Dr He.

 

In 2018, HKBU's Department of Computer Science and Department of Journalism jointly established an interdisciplinary Data and Media Communication Concentration in its undergraduate programme. In 2019, the School of Communication and the Department of Journalism took a step forward with the launch of the Master of Science (MSc) in AI and Digital Media programme. Both programmes are the first of their kind in Hong Kong, and they aim to respond to changes and challenges faced by the industry in this computational and digital age.

 

Wisers is the world's leading provider of Chinese media and business intelligence. Wisers AI Lab's advanced proprietary technologies cover the full spectrum of automated media intelligence, such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition, knowledge graphing, and critical event detection and tracking. Its automatic document summarisation technology claimed the top spot at the International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing in 2018.

 

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Media enquiries: Patricia Chan of the School of Communication ( 3411 7875 / patricia@hkbu.edu.hk)

	(From left, first row) Professor Rick Wong and Mr Tony Wang sign the agreement. (From left, back row) Dr Cane Leung, Dr William Cheung, Professor Huang Yu, Dr He Chao, Dr Chen Li and Dr Zhang Xinzhi attend the signing ceremony.