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Professor Peng Gong, Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Development) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has been selected as one of the 22 recipients of the 2020 Q1/Q2 AWS Amazon Machine Learning Research Award (MLRA) for his research titled “21st Century Seasonal to Annual Global Land Cover and Land Use Dynamics: A Spatial- Temporal Cube Reconstruction Approach Using Amazon Web Services”. The project seeks to derive a long time-series and seasonal land cover and land use maps that are widely demanded in areas including urban planning and management, food security, biological protection, climate change mitigation, development of clean energy, and public health.

The AWS Machine Learning Research Awards (MLRA) aims to advance machine learning (ML) by funding innovative research and open-source projects in areas that align with its mission to advance customer-obsessed science, such as robotics, machine learning, security etc. 

Professor Gong is delighted to see his project being chosen for the award. He said: “Recognizing land cover and land use types from remotely sensed data requires the use of advanced deep learning and AI technologies. Our global environmental mapping and monitoring research is exactly the type of applications that the AWS machine learning research awards are supporting.”

“I hope that raw satellite data can be processed into easy-to-use format so that it could be made widely available to the general public. When this project is done, even middle school students can use satellite data in their study of the environment by looking at the trend of changes in a certain area of interest. This process requires large capacity cloud computing that Amazon Web Service is particularly good at.” Professor Gong added.

Since 2017, AWS Machine Learning Research Awards (MLRA) has supported more than 190 research projects from 80 schools and research institutes in 15 countries, on topics such as ML algorithms, computer vision, natural language processing, medical research, neuroscience, social science, physics, and robotics. The 2020 Q1/Q2 awards have been extended to working with universities in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the first time.

Professor Gong joined HKU as Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor in January 2021. He is also concurrently Chair Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences (Geography) and the Faculty of Science (Earth Sciences). He was formerly Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Science, and Head of the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University, China, and was Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.

Professor Gong is a co-founder of the Center for Assessment and Monitoring of Forest and Environmental Resources at UC Berkeley. He built the first Earth System Science Institute in China at Nanjing University, the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University, and the Tsinghua Urban Institute at Tsinghua University. In 2020, he led an expert preparation group in establishing the Vanke School of Public Health at Tsinghua.

Professor Gong's major research interests include urbanization and health, mapping and monitoring of global environmental change, and modelling of environmentally related infectious diseases. He has received a number of research awards from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the Association of American Geographers as well as the Joint Board Council of Science China and Science Bulletin.

Please click here for the biography of Professor Gong Peng.
For details about the 2020 Q1/Q2 AWS Amazon Machine Learning Research Award, please click here.

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