William Mong Distinguished Lecture (February 6, 2026)
Jan 20, 2026
Date: February 6, 2026 (Friday)
Time: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm (Reception starts at 11:00 am)
Venue: Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two, G/F, Run Run Shaw Building, HKU
Speaker: Professor Steven Low, California Institute of Technology, USA
All members of the HKU community and the general public are welcome to join. Seats for on-site participants are limited. Interested parties, please register through the link below by February 5, 2026 (Thursday), 18:00:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104825
A confirmation email will be sent to participants who have successfully registered.
About the lecture:
The disastrous impacts of global warming are becoming a yearly occurrence because of the unprecedented increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution, driven by a rising economy enabled by energy consumption. In 2016, three-quarters of the global greenhouse emission was due to energy use. We therefore must electrify transportation and generate electricity from clean, renewable sources. Energy transition is the defining challenge of this century and requires a global and sustained effort. I will discuss some technical and economic challenges in energy transition and share some of our efforts in this endeavour.
About the speaker:
Professor Steven Low is the F. J. Gilloon Professor of the Computing & Mathematical Sciences Department and Electrical Engineering Department at Caltech. Before that, he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held honorary/chaired professorships in Australia, China and other regions. He is an awardee of the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award and the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award, and a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and CSEE. He is well-known for work on Internet congestion control and optimal power flow problems in smart grid. His research has been deployed on the Internet for content distribution since 2012 and in the US for large-scale workplace electric vehicle charging since 2017. He is the author of Power System Analysis: Analytical Tools and Structural Properties (Cambridge 2026). He received his B.S. from Cornell and PhD from Berkeley, both in EE.