Moritz Bilagher is honoured to be a member of the Academy of Future Education and, in particular, the Learning Institute for Future Excellence (LIFE) as a Professor of Practice in Global Citizenship Education (GCED). He holds a Doctorate in Education from King’s College London, a Master of Science degree in Educational Research Methodology from the University of Oxford and a Master of Science degree in Science Dynamics from the University of Amsterdam. In addition, he holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civic Education and a teaching license from Hogeschool Holland.
As Professor of Practice, Moritz Bilagher obtained the majority of his work experience outside academia, mainly in international cooperation and development in education, with UNESCO (Nairobi, Santiago, Bangkok and Paris), UNRWA (Amman and Beirut), the World Bank-based Global Partnership of Education (Washington, DC) and the British government Agency for ICT in Education Becta (Coventry) in education management, research and evaluation.
In his most recent assignment for UNESCO, Prof. Bilagher was Deputy Director and Acting Director of the UNESCO-UNWRA Department of Education, where he (co-) led the UNRWA education programme with around 22,000 education staff including approximately 18,000 teachers and over 500,000 students at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
He hopes to bring his experience in the field to the university context, to the benefit of students and colleagues and his research interests include international education, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, global citizenship education (GCED), peace education, educational assessment (psychometrics) and socio-emotional learning (SEL).
Topic: Peace in our time: How can education support the efforts against war?
Abstract: While we currently see the devastating effects of war, in Europe and the Near East, we are faced with the question: can education play a role in preventing this? The explicit idea of Education for Peace, or Peace Education, has existed for at least around a 100 years now, i.e. since Maria Montessori gave her seminal lectures on this topic in the inter-bellum period, mainly in Copenhagen and Geneva at the International Bureau of Education (IBE), which has been incorporated into UNESCO since 1969. In her view, education must build lasting peace, while all politics can do is keep us out of war. Since then, the field has been further developed and several Peace Education initiatives have been implemented worldwide, including in (post-) conflict areas. In this lecture, I will provide an overview of this field and argue that one branch of Peace Education, i.e. Education for Global Citizenship / Global Citizenship Education (GCED) represents its essence. Finally, I will present data of an empirical study on what global citizenship means to students at XJTLU and discuss the implications of the findings for the field.
Professor Heechae Choi joined the Chemistry Department of XJTLU as a professor in January 2023 after spending years at University of Cologne, Germany, where he started his independent academic career with a prestigious fellowship, MOPGA-GRI (Sep.2018 – Dec.2022).
Before his first independent research launched in Germany, he founded two venture companies, Virtual Lab Inc. and Materials Lab (Mar.2016, Aug.2018), which provide materials simulation platform and consulting services to big manufacturing companies including Samsung Electronics, 3M, SK, MiCo.
He has developed several theory models for quality controls of mass produced functional materials running his technology-based business and doing academic work in parallel.
The projects that he conducted as the PI are mostly about the theory-based materials processing condition predictions for high-technology business such as
– Apple’s iPhone antenna materials
– Samsung Electronics’s capacitor lifetime
– Reliance-Samsung network device
– SK Hynix electrostatic chuck
Heechae’s current main research interests are in fundamental approaches to energy conversion materials and semiconductor processing.
Topic: Venture Company Foundation with Fundamental Scientific Research
Abstract: The ultimate goals of fundamental scientific research activity are to discover the laws of nature, and to make the world a better place. Academic job devoted to fundamental scientific research is one of the most pleasant occupations because it is mostly initiated by intellectual curiosities of individuals. When scientists reach mature levels of scientific knowledge and academic activities, some of them start to have desires to test the values of their knowledge and technology in the real market for various reasons, such as better recognitions, research funding acquisitions, extra incomes. Establishing a new business utilizing professional scientific knowledge and technology can be an efficient way to experience the real world and to evaluate the market value of his/her scientific knowledge. However, it is very challenging to launch a new business especially for scientist who has no experiences of running a business before. In this XJTLU Public Lecture, I will share my personal experiences of launching venture companies with my fundamental scientific research knowledge based on quantum mechanics, which I believe will give some ideas to students or scientists who are considering a new knowledge-based business.
Professor Kah Phooi Seng (Jasmine) is a renowned and international discipline leader in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Advanced Computing Systems with over two decades of experience and independent contributions to original creative research. She is currently Full Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University’s Entrepreneur College in Taicang School of AI and Advanced Computing (AIAC). She is also the Research Leader for theresearch group of ‘AI Acceleration and Intelligent Sensing for Interdisciplinary Research (2AISense)’. Prior to this appointment, she held senior academic leadership and honorary professorships across several UK, Australian and Asian institutions.Her research publications include four books and over 250 articles in academic journals and international conferences.Her research expertise and interests include AI, machine learning and data analytics, big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, multimodal information processing, embedded intelligence and systems. Professor Seng’s research contributions have been recognized internationally including awards such as Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET UK), International Discipline Leading Talent Project (Outstanding) of Science and Education Innovation Zone andwas listed among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited scientists for single-year citation impact in 2022 and 2023. Professor Seng has graduated 16 PhD students and served as doctoral and external examiners for several universities. She has a strong passion and strengths for mentoring earlier career researchers and encouraging girls and women into STEM
Topic: Embedded Intelligence and the Data-Driven Future of AI and IoT for Smart Environments
Abstract: The advances and convergence in digital technologies, sensing technologies and in combination with intelligent analytics and edgeartificial intelligence (AI) have shaped the technologies of the future. In this talk, Professor Kah Phooi Seng will introduce research topics and her works on embedding intelligence (EI) into sensing platforms and devices including shaping AI and Internet of Things (IoT) for deployment in smart environments. AI and machine learning algorithms can be used to automatically infer information about data being transported and ingested without the need for relying on human intervention. However, to achieve fast analysis and early detection for actionable insights in AI and IoT applications and services, the current trend is to move the sensing and intelligent information capabilities from centralized processing to a distributed or decentralized information processing and computational framework. The mature development of edge computing devices affords the development of aportable, reduced computational complexity hardware platform to serve as an analytics engine for on-node deployments. The presentation will cover the challenges and future directions for embedded intelligence and how distributed AI approaches can help to mitigate social challenges like privacy and security for the development of the AI and analytics engines in smart environments.
25 September
Time, Venue：5:30 – 7:00PM IR G-16, SIP
Speaker: Professor Moritz Bilagher
Moritz Bilagher is honoured to be a member of the Academy of Future Education and, in particular, the Learning Institute for Future Excellence (LIFE) as a Professor of Practice in Global Citizenship Education (GCED). He holds a Doctorate in Education from King’s College London, a Master of Science degree in Educational Research Methodology from the University of Oxford and a Master of Science degree in Science Dynamics from the University of Amsterdam. In addition, he holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civic Education and a teaching license from Hogeschool Holland.
As Professor of Practice, Moritz Bilagher obtained the majority of his work experience outside academia, mainly in international cooperation and development in education, with UNESCO (Nairobi, Santiago, Bangkok and Paris), UNRWA (Amman and Beirut), the World Bank-based Global Partnership of Education (Washington, DC) and the British government Agency for ICT in Education Becta (Coventry) in education management, research and evaluation.
In his most recent assignment for UNESCO, Prof. Bilagher was Deputy Director and Acting Director of the UNESCO-UNWRA Department of Education, where he (co-) led the UNRWA education programme with around 22,000 education staff including approximately 18,000 teachers and over 500,000 students at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
He hopes to bring his experience in the field to the university context, to the benefit of students and colleagues and his research interests include international education, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, global citizenship education (GCED), peace education, educational assessment (psychometrics) and socio-emotional learning (SEL).
Topic: Peace in our time: How can education support the efforts against war?
Abstract: While we currently see the devastating effects of war, in Europe and the Near East, we are faced with the question: can education play a role in preventing this? The explicit idea of Education for Peace, or Peace Education, has existed for at least around a 100 years now, i.e. since Maria Montessori gave her seminal lectures on this topic in the inter-bellum period, mainly in Copenhagen and Geneva at the International Bureau of Education (IBE), which has been incorporated into UNESCO since 1969. In her view, education must build lasting peace, while all politics can do is keep us out of war. Since then, the field has been further developed and several Peace Education initiatives have been implemented worldwide, including in (post-) conflict areas. In this lecture, I will provide an overview of this field and argue that one branch of Peace Education, i.e. Education for Global Citizenship / Global Citizenship Education (GCED) represents its essence. Finally, I will present data of an empirical study on what global citizenship means to students at XJTLU and discuss the implications of the findings for the field.
23 October
Time, Venue：5:30 – 7:00PM IR G-16, SIP
Speaker: Professor Heechae Choi
Professor Heechae Choi joined the Chemistry Department of XJTLU as a professor in January 2023 after spending years at University of Cologne, Germany, where he started his independent academic career with a prestigious fellowship, MOPGA-GRI (Sep.2018 – Dec.2022).
Before his first independent research launched in Germany, he founded two venture companies, Virtual Lab Inc. and Materials Lab (Mar.2016, Aug.2018), which provide materials simulation platform and consulting services to big manufacturing companies including Samsung Electronics, 3M, SK, MiCo.
He has developed several theory models for quality controls of mass produced functional materials running his technology-based business and doing academic work in parallel.
The projects that he conducted as the PI are mostly about the theory-based materials processing condition predictions for high-technology business such as
– Apple’s iPhone antenna materials
– Samsung Electronics’s capacitor lifetime
– Reliance-Samsung network device
– SK Hynix electrostatic chuck
Heechae’s current main research interests are in fundamental approaches to energy conversion materials and semiconductor processing.
Topic: Venture Company Foundation with Fundamental Scientific Research
Abstract: The ultimate goals of fundamental scientific research activity are to discover the laws of nature, and to make the world a better place. Academic job devoted to fundamental scientific research is one of the most pleasant occupations because it is mostly initiated by intellectual curiosities of individuals. When scientists reach mature levels of scientific knowledge and academic activities, some of them start to have desires to test the values of their knowledge and technology in the real market for various reasons, such as better recognitions, research funding acquisitions, extra incomes. Establishing a new business utilizing professional scientific knowledge and technology can be an efficient way to experience the real world and to evaluate the market value of his/her scientific knowledge. However, it is very challenging to launch a new business especially for scientist who has no experiences of running a business before. In this XJTLU Public Lecture, I will share my personal experiences of launching venture companies with my fundamental scientific research knowledge based on quantum mechanics, which I believe will give some ideas to students or scientists who are considering a new knowledge-based business.
13 November
Time, Venue：12:00 – 1:30PM G-1006, XEC
Speaker: Professor Jasmine Kah Phooi SENG
Professor Kah Phooi Seng (Jasmine) is a renowned and international discipline leader in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Advanced Computing Systems with over two decades of experience and independent contributions to original creative research. She is currently Full Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University’s Entrepreneur College in Taicang School of AI and Advanced Computing (AIAC). She is also the Research Leader for the research group of ‘AI Acceleration and Intelligent Sensing for Interdisciplinary Research (2AISense)’. Prior to this appointment, she held senior academic leadership and honorary professorships across several UK, Australian and Asian institutions. Her research publications include four books and over 250 articles in academic journals and international conferences. Her research expertise and interests include AI, machine learning and data analytics, big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, multimodal information processing, embedded intelligence and systems. Professor Seng’s research contributions have been recognized internationally including awards such as Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET UK), International Discipline Leading Talent Project (Outstanding) of Science and Education Innovation Zone and was listed among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited scientists for single-year citation impact in 2022 and 2023. Professor Seng has graduated 16 PhD students and served as doctoral and external examiners for several universities. She has a strong passion and strengths for mentoring earlier career researchers and encouraging girls and women into STEM
Topic: Embedded Intelligence and the Data-Driven Future of AI and IoT for Smart Environments
Abstract: The advances and convergence in digital technologies, sensing technologies and in combination with intelligent analytics and edge artificial intelligence (AI) have shaped the technologies of the future. In this talk, Professor Kah Phooi Seng will introduce research topics and her works on embedding intelligence (EI) into sensing platforms and devices including shaping AI and Internet of Things (IoT) for deployment in smart environments. AI and machine learning algorithms can be used to automatically infer information about data being transported and ingested without the need for relying on human intervention. However, to achieve fast analysis and early detection for actionable insights in AI and IoT applications and services, the current trend is to move the sensing and intelligent information capabilities from centralized processing to a distributed or decentralized information processing and computational framework. The mature development of edge computing devices affords the development of a portable, reduced computational complexity hardware platform to serve as an analytics engine for on-node deployments. The presentation will cover the challenges and future directions for embedded intelligence and how distributed AI approaches can help to mitigate social challenges like privacy and security for the development of the AI and analytics engines in smart environments.