We are pleased to announce that HINCare has been selected for the Project Showcase at HKU Innovation Week 2026. Our project, “HINCare: AI Solution for Intelligent Volunteer Matching”, will be featured under the Smart Living and Wellness category.

HKU Innovation Week is The University of Hong Kong’s annual flagship celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship. This year, the event returns as a vibrant, living ecosystem – “The Innovation Reef: Where Ideas Breed and Thrive”. Just as coral reefs sustain thriving marine ecosystems, the event brings together over 800 visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and industry leaders from around the world to transform breakthrough discoveries into real-world impact.

HINCare looks forward to sharing how AI can support more efficient volunteer matching and connecting with the wider innovation community.

Event Details
HKU Innovation Week 2026
Date: 12–16 October 2026
Venue: HKU Campus

Main Event
Date: 14 October 2026 (Wednesday)
Event Time: 09:30–11:30
Exhibition: 09:00–18:00
Venue: Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam

For more information about HKU Innovation Week 2026, please visit the official website:
https://tec.hku.hk/innovation-week-2026/

Database systems, which provide various operations for defining and querying data, enable large-scale AI systems and intelligent applications in various domains. Due to recent advances in large language models (LLMs), automating database operations through code generation has become increasingly attainable. This capability of having data intelligence in LLMs has given rise to a new paradigm—Data-Centric Code Generation (DCCG)—which aims to build systems that can automatically understand, manipulate, and reason over data.

In this talk, Professor Cheng will discuss their team’s effort in building benchmarking systems, including BIRD-SQL, a large-scale Text-to-SQL benchmark on real databases, and SWE-SQL, which gauges the ability that an LLM resolves user SQL issues. These benchmarks, widely used in the industry, reveal hallucination and other issues faced by LLMs. To address these challenges, he will present their work in graph-aware reasoning, SQL correction, and multi-turn tabular data analysis. They aim to evolve LLMs from static code generators into autonomous, trustworthy agents, with data intelligence, that can understand and generate data-driven software systems.

Date: 30th July 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00 PM
Venue: Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two (G/F, Run Run Shaw Building, HKU)
Speaker: Professor Reynold C.K. Cheng, Professor and Department Head of Data Science & AI, School of Computing and Data Science, HKU

Register now:
https://innowings.engg.hku.hk/dataintelligence/

Prof. Reynold Cheng has been invited to speak on the topic of “AI for Social Goods: STAR Lab’s Experience” at the ICMSS 2026 Conference. The ICMSS 2026 Conference will be held from March 20-22 in Wuhan, China.

The ICMSS conference provides professional interactions of emerging management engineering, software engineering and service sciences. Additionally, it serves as a conduit for delivering advanced technology to the regional industry.

In the talk, Prof. Cheng will share how the HKU STAR (Social Technology And Research) Lab applies AI and data science to support elderly and family care services. He will introduce HINCare, a software platform designed to foster volunteering and a culture of mutual help within communities. Also, he will discuss a collaborative project with the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust regarding an innovative case management and AI-enabled data analysis system.

Details of the talk are as follows:

Date: 21 March 2026
Time: 10:50-11:30 (UTC+8)
Zoom ID: 812 5250 5192
Pwd: 2022
ICMSS Website: https://www.icmss.org/

Prof. Reynold Cheng has been invited to give a live talk on the topic of “BIRD-SQL: Towards Automatic Data-Centric Code Generation ” at Wuhan University.

In the talk, Prof. Cheng will discuss his team’s effort in building benchmarking systems and present his work in graph-aware reasoning, SQL correction, and multi-turn tabular data analysis.

Details of the talk are as follows:

Date: 20 March 2026
Time: 15:00
Venue: B404, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University

Professor Reynold Cheng, Leader of the HKU STAR Lab, will unveil how data science serves society at the Google Cloud Education Summit Hong Kong 2026. He has been invited as a distinguished speaker to share the Lab’s pioneering work in applying data science to address critical societal challenges.

The summit, a premier gathering for Hong Kong’s education leaders, will take place on January 31, 2026, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Focusing on the theme “The Future of Learning: AI for Every Classroom,” it aims to move beyond theory and deliver actionable strategies for educational transformation.

At 3:50 PM, Professor Cheng will lead a session titled “Data Science for Social Goods: STAR Lab’s Experience.” While Data Science and AI are often associated with commercial efficiency and profit maximization, their potential to solve deep-rooted social challenges is equally profound. In this session, the HKU STAR Lab shares its pioneering journey in “Data Science for Social Good,” demonstrating how advanced technology can be humanized to serve the community’s most vulnerable sectors.

Date: 31 January, 2026 (Saturday)
Registration Time: 1:15 PM – 2:00 PM
Event Time: 2:00 PM – 5:20 PM
Venue: Meeting Room N201, 2/F, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (Phase 2)
Address: 1 Expo Drive, Wanchai, Hong Kong

Register Link:
https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/hk-google-cloud-education-summit-2026#