Congratulations to Ms. Yaping ZHAO, postgraduate student supervised by Prof. Edmund Y. Lam, at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, for winning 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.
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.
This award not only recognises the scientific originality and practical relevance of the project but also its potential societal impact across multiple industries.
^Group photo of Ms. Yaping ZHAO (right) and her supervisor Prof. Edmund Y. Lam (left).
Read more about the award: https://www.hknetea.org/competitions-1/results-announcement