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CityUHK tops Hong Kong universities in funding under the RGC’s two flagship research schemes, securing three projects including a five-year Areas of Excellence project

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HONG KONG, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Scholars at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) achieved outstanding results in the latest Research Grants Council’s (RGC) Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme and Theme-based Research Scheme (TRS). A total of three flagship research projects received funding, representing a record high for the University, while the total funding secured was the highest among all universities in Hong Kong. The achievements reflect strong recognition of CityUHK’s cutting-edge research excellence and its continuous contributions to the strategic development of Hong Kong and the nation.

The three five-year research projects are led by Professor Wang Xun-li, Chair Professor in the Department of Physics; Professor Zhang Hua, Herman Hu Chair Professor of Nanomaterials and Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy; and Professor Wang Jianping, Dean of the College of Computing.

The project led by Professor Wang Xun-li received HK$50 million (approximately US$6.41 million) under the AoE Scheme to establish the Hong Kong Centre for Neutron Scattering (HKCNS), a world’s premier neutron scattering research platform based at CityUHK in collaboration with other local universities.

Closely aligned with the technological development strategies of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), the project will strengthen strategic collaboration between Hong Kong and the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan, a world-class scientific facility. It aims to enhance Hong Kong’s research capabilities, accelerate materials discovery and technology development, and promote talent cultivation and international collaboration across the GBA.

“Hong Kong has established strong research foundations in neutron scattering, supported by several internationally recognised leaders and a cohort of early- to mid-career scholars whose expertise spans instrument design, advanced experimentation and sophisticated data analysis,” said Professor Wang. “CityUHK has taken the lead in establishing the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Neutron Scattering Laboratory and the Chinese Academy of Sciences-Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Neutron Scattering. We have also played a key role in the design and development of China’s first total-scattering neutron diffractometer, the Multi-Physics Instrument, whose technical performance and scientific output have reached world-class standards. In addition, CityUHK has established an effective innovation ecosystem that facilitates the translation of frontier research into practical applications.”

The AoE Scheme funds two to three projects annually across Hong Kong, each led by an internationally renowned scholar. The scheme aims to strengthen Hong Kong’s leadership in strategic research areas and advance its development into a world-class hub for research and innovation.

Led by Professor Zhang, the project titled “Novel Unconventional Cu-based Catalysts for CO₂ Conversion towards Scalable Production of Value-added Chemicals” secured HK$39.64 million (approximately US$5.08 million) under the TRS. The project focuses on frontier developments in green technology and clean energy. It integrates AI-guided catalyst design with unique Phase Engineering of Nanomaterials (PEN) technology to synthesize novel catalysts, efficiently converting waste carbon dioxide into high-value chemicals, such as ethylene and ethanol, on a scalable industrial level.

It actively aligns with the HKSAR Government’s Climate Action Plan 2050 and the national “Dual Carbon” strategy. The project will collaborate with over ten enterprises in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland, leveraging CityUHK’s “HK Tech 300” programme to accelerate commercialisation.

“With the urgent global demand for sustainable green technology and decarbonisation, CityUHK will continue to provide a one-stop R&D roadmap covering material design, theoretical modelling and scalable production,” said Professor Zhang. “By deepening collaboration with industry, we aim to translate research outcomes into tangible economic and social benefits.”

Also funded under the TRS, receiving HK$55.69 million (approximately US$7.14 million), was a project led by Professor Wang Jianping, titled “SynapseCity: AI Driven Urban Emergency Response and Rescue”, a flagship AI initiative targeting urban public safety and emergency management. The project aims to build “SynapseCity”, the world’s first privacy-preserving, cross-departmental emergency coordination platform.

By leveraging Multi-Agent Systems to eliminate data silos, SynapseCity provides real-time analysis, knowledge sharing and decision support for extreme weather events and emergencies. The project has garnered support from over 20 government, industry and academic institutions locally and globally, including the Hong Kong Fire Services Department, the Hong Kong Police Force, the Hong Kong Observatory, Towngas, China Taiping Insurance and the University of Cambridge.

“Looking ahead to smart city development, urban public safety faces increasingly complex and dynamic challenges,” said Professor Wang. “Traditional, fragmented emergency networks can no longer meet the demands for real-time cross-departmental collaboration. CityUHK has a strong research foundation and interdisciplinary advantages in AI, smart cities, structural and infrastructure safety and lifecycle maintenance, as well as disaster- and climate-resilient cities. Through this project, our team will drive interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration, providing key technical support for public safety and resilience building in Hong Kong and smart cities worldwide.”

A total of 30 CityUHK’s scholars participating in the above three CityUHK-led projects. In addition, CityUHK scholars are involved in six other AoE/TRS projects jointly led by other universities. Notably, all four projects awarded funding under the RGC’s AoE Scheme this year include the participation of CityUHK researchers, highlighting the University’s strong influence and leadership in cross-institutional research collaboration.

Media enquiries:
Him Chak, Communications and Institutional Research Office, CityUHK (Tel: 3442 6807)

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SOURCE CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

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Former Shanghai Innovation Bank and Silicon Valley Bank Asia Executive Jade Lu Joins Alpha Ladder as Wealth and International CEO

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Appointment marks the next phase of Alpha Ladder Wealth Management Solutions and the Group’s international expansion, as Alpha Ladder advances its ambition to support Chinese enterprises going global with a broader financial services platform

SINGAPORE, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Alpha Ladder Group Pte. Ltd. (“Alpha Ladder”), today announced the appointment of Jade Lu as Wealth CEO and International CEO, reporting directly to Dr Bo Bai, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Alpha Ladder Group.

Jade brings more than 20 years of international banking experience and was previously President and Executive Director of Shanghai Innovation Bank (Previously known as SPD Silicon Valley Bank) and, concurrently from 2020 to 2023,  with Silicon Valley Bank Asia. She previously held senior leadership roles at Standard Chartered Bank and Citibank.

In her dual role, Jade will lead two strategic growth priorities for Alpha Ladder: the development and international expansion of Alpha Ladder’s Wealth Management Solutions and the build-out of Alpha Ladder’s international financial services capabilities across key global markets.

Her appointment also marks the next phase of Alpha Ladder’s international growth ambitions, including building a broader financial services platform to support the growing needs of Chinese enterprises expanding globally. As these businesses establish and grow their operations overseas, Alpha Ladder aims to support their increasingly complex financial needs across markets.

Building the next generation of wealth through Alpha Ladder’s Wealth Management Solutions

Wealth creation is undergoing a historic paradigm shift. Accelerated by AI and next-generation technologies, global economic and industrial structures are being fundamentally reshaped. Alpha Ladder’s Wealth Management Solutions is built to empower investors to capture these multi-dimensional opportunities.

Alpha Ladder defines the next generation of wealth as a powerful fusion: uniting strict regulatory compliance and the fundamental risk discipline inherent to finance with the agility and innovation of new digital paradigms.

Through its Wealth Management Solutions, Alpha Ladder delivers an integrated, multi-dimensional platform. It enables clients to seamlessly access, manage, and diversify their portfolios across traditional and future-facing assets.

Jade will champion the platform’s global proposition and ecosystem, cementing it as a core pillar of Alpha Ladder’s international expansion.

Supporting Chinese enterprises as they go global

As International CEO, Jade will lead Alpha Ladder’s international strategy across Hong Kong, the Middle East & Africa, Europe, the United States and Latin America, building the Group’s capabilities and partnerships in markets where its clients increasingly operate.

A major focus will be supporting Chinese enterprises through the increasingly complex financial requirements that come with international expansion.

As companies enter new markets, their needs extend well beyond moving capital across borders. They require financial partners that understand both their home-market context and the regulatory and commercial environments in which they are expanding, while being able to support their evolving requirements as their international businesses grow.

Alpha Ladder’s ambition is to build a full-spectrum international financial services platform for cross-border enterprises, spanning four core areas: financing, payment, wealth and compliance. Together, these capabilities are intended to support Chinese enterprises across different stages of their global journey, from establishing in new markets to managing increasingly complex financial requirements as they scale.

Dr Bo Bai, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Alpha Ladder Group, said:

“Jade joins Alpha Ladder at an important stage of our development, as we accelerate both our wealth and international strategies.

She brings more than two decades of international banking experience, together with a deep understanding of China’s innovation economy and the financial needs of companies as they grow beyond their home markets. Her leadership experience at Shanghai Innovation Bank and Silicon Valley Bank Asia is particularly relevant as we build for this next phase.

With Jade leading Alpha Ladder’s Wealth Management Solutions and our international expansion, we aim to build a differentiated wealth proposition while strengthening Alpha Ladder’s capabilities across financing, payment, wealth and compliance. Our ambition is to support enterprises with the financial capabilities they need as they expand and operate across markets.”

During her tenure at Shanghai Innovation Bank and Silicon Valley Bank Asia, Jade played a leading role in China’s innovation finance ecosystem, working with high-growth companies and venture capital institutions and providing full-lifecycle financial services across different stages of their development.

Jade Lu, Wealth CEO and International CEO of Alpha Ladder Group, said:

“Chinese companies are entering a new phase of international growth. As they expand into more markets, their financial needs are becoming broader and more complex. They need financial partners that understand where they come from, the markets they are entering, and how their requirements evolve as they grow internationally.

Wealth management is evolving at the same time. Technology is changing how clients access, manage and diversify wealth across markets, while trust, regulatory discipline and institutional standards remain fundamental.

I look forward to working closely with Dr Bai and the team as we build the next phase of Alpha Ladder’s growth. My focus will be on building Alpha Ladder’s Wealth Management Solutions into a distinctive wealth proposition and strengthening our international financial services platform to support companies and clients as they grow across markets.”

Jade holds a Bachelor of Economics from Fudan University and an International MBA from the University of Hong Kong, and served as a member of the first Sci-Tech Innovation Advisory Committee of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

About Alpha Ladder Group

Headquartered in Singapore, Alpha Ladder Group Pte Ltd (Alpha Ladder) is a technology and financial services group driving Digital Green Transformation. We operate on the conviction that the future of financial infrastructure is neither purely centralised nor distributed, but a Hybrid.

From our first member subsidiary founded in 2016, we have grown into a multi-vertical ecosystem that operationalises this conviction across four critical sectors:

Digital Financial Services
In digital financial services, our businesses operate one of Asia’s leading licensed digital financial services platforms, providing compliant payment and wealth services, with annualised transaction volume of US$14 billion (FY26 run rate).Sustainable Investment
Our sustainable investment business is an award-winning impact investment firm with around US$2.9 billion AUM*, focusing on investing in deep-tech companies for decarbonisation.AI-Powered Green Technology
In green technology, our businesses provide end-to-end carbon SaaS solutions, including an AI emission factor search engine, Scope 1, 2 & 3 measurement, decarbonisation rating, AI ESG reporting, and green asset development & trading.AI-Native Energy Intelligence
In AI-native energy intelligence, our businesses are advancing AI for energy by forging hybrid models that ground graph transformers in deterministic physics and high-throughput real-world validation. Our platforms deploy this intelligence to address the pressing energy challenges constraining AI and other mission-critical infrastructure, providing speed, resilience and sustainability to the systems that power the compute age.

At Alpha Ladder Group, our name reflects our commitment to continuous evolution. We believe that by engineering the intersection of Digital and Green, we move the world forward to pursue sustainable alpha—one particle at a time.

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SOURCE ALPHA LADDER GROUP PTE. LTD.

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ContentLens: India’s First AI Platform That Protects Your Personal Identity

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MUMBAI, India, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Around 90% of Indians have already encountered a fake celebrity endorsement. Indian celebrities are increasingly turning to courts to protect their personality and identity rights against AI deepfakes and digital likeness misuse. India’s ContentLens provides the solution to protect your personality rights.

ContentLens builds a unique biometric signature for each protected celebrity, covering their face, voice and visual identity. It runs 24/7 surveillance across social media platforms. The moment a potential violation is found, the celebrity’s team gets an instant alert with full evidence and an information package required to initiate and support a takedown request or legal case. India has approximately 15 million active content creators. Even if each creator uploads just 5-6 videos a month, the resulting volume is approximately 75-90 million content pieces. No human team can monitor this at scale. Detection that once took months now takes minutes.

Experiencing the platform firsthand, famous Indian actress Manisha Kandkur says, “I have spent years building my name, my image, and the trust of my fans. When I discovered that AI-generated versions of my face were appearing in fraudulent advertisements, without my knowledge or consent, it was one of the most violating experiences I have had as a public figure. Within days of onboarding, the ContentLens platform flagged multiple instances of my likeness being misused. Every artist deserves this kind of personality rights protection platform.”

Rohan Sahu, Founder & CEO, ContentLens, says, “ContentLens is already working with the Indian music industry and helping them to protect their music IP from unauthorised use. A celebrity’s identity or IP is their face, their voice, the way they carry themselves visually. It is their most valuable and most important personal asset. Generative AI, without safety guardrails, has made it possible for anyone to misuse this IP. Every week, our platform finds potential violations that the celebrity teams had no idea existed, such as fake endorsements, voice clones and scam ads. ContentLens is the only platform in India built specifically to detect it and stop it.”

Hari Nair, Strategic Advisor (ContentLens) & Former CEO (Tips Music Limited), says, “Across celebrity teams in India, the reaction is always the same: they know the deepfake threat is real. What they often don’t realize is that their identity is also being used by brands without permission, a clear revenue loss, and that fake endorsements built on it can just as easily be used to run scams. Do celebrity teams actually know what’s being done with their face, voice and visuals on social media today? If the answer is no, that’s exactly the problem ContentLens solves.”

About ContentLens

ContentLens (www.contentlens.ai) is an AI-powered intellectual property protection platform built for the generative AI era. The company operates across four verticals: celebrity likeness and deepfake detection, music IP protection, content provenance (C2PA) & watermarking, and counterfeit brand detection. ContentLens is headquartered in Bangalore, India, and serves celebrity talent, music labels, sports organisations and enterprise brands seeking to protect their IP at scale.

 

 

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Tencent Cloud and Boost Collaborate to Accelerate Digital Transformation Across Southeast Asia

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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced its partnership with Boost, a regional fintech leader and digital bank, to support the fintech’s digital transformation and innovation initiatives across Malaysia and Indonesia.

Under the partnership, Tencent Cloud and Boost have entered into a partnership spanning AI innovation, cloud infrastructure modernization, and super app development, representing one of the industry’s more comprehensive collaborations across these technology domains.

Building a Unified Cloud and AI Foundation for Fintech Growth

As fintech companies across Southeast Asia scale their operations and expand service offerings, organizations are increasingly seeking strategic cloud partners that can provide integrated solutions spanning infrastructure, AI, and platform technologies. To support its next phase of growth, Boost selected Tencent Cloud as a strategic technology partner to consolidate infrastructure, accelerate AI adoption, and drive innovation across its digital ecosystem.

The collaboration encompasses three key pillars. First, Tencent Cloud will provide its scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to Boost across Malaysia and Indonesia. This will enable Boost to streamline infrastructure management, improve operational agility, and support future business expansion with scalable cloud resources.

Second, Boost will leverage Tencent Cloud Super App as a Service (TCSAS) to augment existing customer experiences, drawing on Tencent Cloud’s proven expertise in building large-scale super app ecosystems. The platform will integrate multiple financial services into a unified user experience, enabling consumers and businesses to access a wider range of digital financial solutions through a single application. Additionally, Boost will partner with Tencent Cloud on its AI development roadmap to co-create products and leverage on the existing off the shelf products offered by Tencent Cloud.  

Poshu Yeung, Senior Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent Cloud International, said: “Southeast Asia continues to be one of the world’s most dynamic digital economies, creating significant opportunities for fintech innovation. We are pleased to partner with Boost as it advances its digital transformation journey across the region. By combining cloud infrastructure, AI capabilities, and super app technologies, Tencent Cloud is committed to helping Boost accelerate innovation, enhance customer experiences, and unlock new opportunities for growth in an increasingly digital economy.”

Sheyantha Abeykoon, Group Chief Executive Officer of Boost, said: “At Boost, we are committed to driving financial inclusion and digital innovation across Southeast Asia. Through our collaboration with Tencent Cloud, we are strengthening our technology foundation while exploring new AI-driven capabilities and super app experiences that will help us better serve consumers, merchants, and enterprise customers across the region. Together, we look forward to delivering more seamless, innovative and accessible financial services experiences for our users.”

The collaboration underscores Tencent Cloud’s growing momentum in Southeast Asia’s financial services sector and highlights its ability to provide an integrated ecosystem spanning cloud infrastructure, AI capabilities, and super app technologies. As a leading fintech company and a recent honoree on the CNBC & Statista World’s Top Fintech Companies 2026 list, Boost represents a strong example of the region’s continued fintech innovation and growth. As fintech innovation continues to accelerate across Southeast Asia, Tencent Cloud remains committed to helping organizations modernize operations, unlock new growth opportunities, and deliver enhanced digital experiences at scale.

About Tencent Cloud
Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation. 

About Boost
Since 2017, Boost has been financially empowering millions of users and merchants in Malaysia and Indonesia to be unstoppable. As a leading regional fintech player Boost continues to redefine financial empowerment through fintech and digital banking services, that are designed for inclusivity so that anyone can be achieve their dreams without barriers. This mission is further strengthened with Boost Bank by Axiata and RHB, with a pioneering embedded digital bank app that aims to revolutionize your banking experience and further democratize financial access for all. Ride the wave of innovation with Boost, as we shape the future of fintech, on one powerful platform.  Users can download Boost from the Google Play Store, App Store or HUAWEI AppGallery. For more information, check out the website at http://www.myboost.co, newsroom at https://myboost.co/newsroom, or follow Boost on Facebook  (https://bit.ly/MyBoostAppFacebook) and Instagram (https://bit.ly/MyBoostAppInstagram).

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SOURCE Tencent Cloud

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