a) HKU’s Omni-Mani Team Clinches Championship at Zhuhai International Dexterous Manipulation Challenge
Omni-Mani, a team led by Professor Jia Pan, from the School of Computing and Data Science, has claimed the top prize in the “Daily Life” track at the second Zhuhai International Dexterous Manipulation Challenge and Embodied Intelligence Industry Conference. Competing against 20 elite international teams, Omni-Mani secured the championship title along with RMB 500,000 in prize money and attracted RMB 6 million in follow-up investment interest, which is set to fuel further technological iteration and prototype development.
This year’s competition track was modelled around a kitchen environment, requiring robots to perform human-robot handovers to test core capabilities in human-robot interaction and dexterous manipulation.
To address industry challenges in real-time high-dimensional configuration modelling of deformable objects, the team applied novel ‘low-dimensional manifold skill representation’ and a highly responsive real-time teleoperation system UniBiDex. These innovations enabled precise human-robot collaboration throughout the kitchen scenario, from tool recognition and grasping to smooth handover, with force feedback preventing object damage.
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b) HKU Engineering Postgraduate Student Wins Gold Award in the 7th Greater Bay Area STEAM Excellence Award 2025 (HKSAR)
Ms Yaping Zhao, a postgraduate student Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering supervised by Professor Edmund Y. Lam has been awarded the Gold Award in The 7th Greater Bay Area STEAM Excellence Award 2025 (HKSAR) (2025年第七屆大灣區STEAM卓越奬 (香港)).
The award is one of the most prestigious recognitions in the region, celebrating outstanding achievements in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). The Gold Award (Postgraduate Category) represents the highest honour for postgraduate students and is conferred to only one recipient across all entries and themes from all postgraduate participants.
Ms. Yaping ZHAO (right) and her supervisor Prof. Edmund Y. Lam (left)
The winning entry, titled “Controllable Unsupervised Event-Based Video Generation”, explores a novel system for generating realistic videos from event cameras. Event cameras capture changes in a scene with microsecond precision, making them ideal for challenging lighting conditions or high-speed motion. This work demonstrates controllable video synthesis under such conditions, with applications in autonomous driving, sports analytics, augmented/virtual reality, low-light video streaming, and creative arts.
This research has led to multiple academic outputs and intellectual property:
Published papers:
Yaping Zhao, Pei Zhang, Chutian Wang, and Edmund Y. Lam. Controllable Unsupervised Event-Based Video Generation. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2024. IEEE Xplore Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10647468/
Yaping Zhao, Rongzhou Chen, Chutian Wang, and Edmund Y. Lam. eSports Broadcasts with Event Cameras. International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), 2024. Springer Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-96-6972-1_1
Patents (pending):
Yaping Zhao, Rongzhou Chen, Edmund Y. Lam, System and Method for Broadcasting a Performance Activity. U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 19/293,073, August 2025.
Yaping Zhao, Pei Zhang, Chutian Wang, Edmund Y. Lam, System and Method for Event-Driven Video Synthesis Using Textual Descriptions. U.S. Patent Application No. 19/271,684, July 2025.
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