Director's Note

Dear colleagues and students,

Do More with Less Contact

The new academic year has just started and we would like to take the opportunity to report enhancements and changes of the campus IT environment. 

The difficult situation in the past year has prompted many of us to adopt new ways for advancing our goals, often with a reduced amount of resources. This is not merely the familiar “do more with less” challenge.  This time we need to accomplish the task under social distancing for the protection of everyone.

In the past few months, colleagues in ITSC have been working hard to enhance our services with an aim to help staff and students “do more with less (physical) contact”. Obviously we need to "contact" or "communicate" with people in order to work or learn effectively, but IT can help reduce the need of physical or face-to-face contact in many cases; and can lead to better use of time and energy if used wisely.

We try to optimize IT services and tools for work-from-home as well as online teaching, learning and research. This has involved effort such as introducing new collaboration and productivity tools, tapping into various cloud-based services which capacities scale up with drastically increased demand, accelerating network access for HKUST members,  adopting new cybersecurity tools for secure computing on campus, at home and on the go, increasing user and technical support capacities for extended service hours, helping and training our users to use these new tools, etc. 

I hope you enjoy reading this issue of the Channel Newsletter and please let us have your feedback on these new services. I am pleased to report that the annual user satisfaction survey was successfully conducted in Spring with encouraging results.  Last but not least, the very popular home-grown Path Advisor has entered its 10th anniversary and a mobile app version is set to be released soon. I would like to thank Prof Raymond Wong of CSE and all involved alumni, students and staff for their continual support.  Wish you all a very productive and enjoyable new academic year ahead. Stay safe!

Samuel Kwan

Director of ITSC