Smart Lab is proud to announce the outstanding achievements of its students and faculty at the 2025 Kerry Holdings Limited Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Awards. The award presentation ceremony, held on April 23, recognized innovative research across multiple disciplines, with HKUST students taking home several top honors.

Top Honors for Biomedical AI Research

LIU Runsheng (COMP, Year 3), supervised by Prof. CHEN Hao from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, clinched both the Champion and Best Poster Award for his groundbreaking project, “GAInS: Gradient Anomaly-aware Biomedical Instance Segmentation.”

Biomedical instance segmentation is crucial for accurately identifying and outlining structures such as tissues and cells in medical images. Traditional methods often struggle with overlapping or touching cells, treating each scenario separately and missing the connections between them. LIU’s GAInS approach introduces a new way to detect and refine these complex regions by analyzing the local gradient anomalies—essentially, the sharp changes in image intensity that signal different structures. His method uses a novel Gradient Anomaly Mapping Module (GAMM) to create detailed maps of these regions, and an Adaptive Local Refinement Module (ALRM) that fine-tunes the segmentation boundaries. The result is a system that outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, as demonstrated in extensive experiments across multiple biomedical datasets. The work has also been recognized internationally, having been published at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2024.

Advancing Medical Image Analysis with AI

GU Yi (COMP, Graduated), also supervised by Prof. CHEN Hao, was named Second Runner-Up for his project, “Deep learning for medical image analysis.” GU’s research tackles the challenge of detecting medical anomalies—critical for early disease diagnosis—using artificial intelligence. Traditional models are trained only on healthy data and must identify when something unusual appears. However, these models often struggle to confidently distinguish between normal and abnormal cases.

GU’s solution, D2UE (Diversified Dual-space Uncertainty Estimation), introduces two key innovations. First, a technique called Redundancy-Aware Repulsion (RAR) ensures that AI models learn to agree when analyzing healthy images and disagree when faced with potential anomalies. Second, his Dual-Space Uncertainty (DSU) method examines both the outputs of the models and how those outputs change with slight variations in the input, allowing for more sensitive detection of subtle anomalies. Tested across five medical datasets, D2UE demonstrated superior performance compared to existing methods, marking a significant step forward in AI-powered medical diagnostics.

Looking Ahead

The UROP Office encourages both faculty and students to participate in the upcoming Summer 2025 program. Project proposals and student applications are now open. For further details, please visit the UROP website.

Congratulations to all awardees for their dedication to advancing research and innovation at HKUST!

About Smart Lab

Smart Lab, led by Prof. Hao Chen, is committed to pushing the boundaries of trustworthy AI technologies for healthcare and science. Our research directions include large-scale models for healthcare, computer-assisted intervention, AI for science, and bioinformatics, etc. Our ultimate goal is to spearhead a transformative revolution in medical practices and scientific discoveries, paving the way for a brighter and healthier future.

About The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is a world-class university that excels in driving innovative education, research excellence, and impactful knowledge transfer. With a holistic and interdisciplinary pedagogy approach, HKUST was ranked 3rd in the Times Higher Education’s Young University Rankings 2024, while 12 of its subjects were ranked among the world’s top 50 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024, with “Data Science and Artificial Intelligence” being ranked first in Hong Kong and 10th in the world. Our graduates are highly competitive, consistently ranking among the world’s top 30 most sought-after employees. In terms of research and entrepreneurship, over 80% of our work was rated “internationally excellent” or “world leading” in the latest Research Assessment Exercise 2020 of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee. As of October 2024, HKUST members have founded over 1,800 active start-ups, including 10 Unicorns and 14 exits (IPO or M&A).