ExclusiveHKU duo want to look at air quality ‘down to the individual street’ with HK$50 million project
New platform relies on deep learning technology to produce precise pollution data by crunching government information
Live in Kowloon but want to check on the air quality in Tai O before your hike tomorrow morning? Two University of Hong Kong academics hope to make that possible, as they work on a HK$50 million big data research project.
Harnessing deep learning technology, the duo is engineering a new air quality monitoring platform that can crunch information from government air quality monitoring stations to produce the equivalent effect of 110,000 vastly more precise individual stations spread across the city.
Deep learning, put simply, involves feeding software large amounts of data, which it “learns” and uses to make decisions about other data, similar to how neural networks in the human brain work.
The aim, according to Professor Victor Li On-kwok and Dr Jacqueline Lam Chi-kei of HKU’s electrical and electronic engineering department, will be to build an air quality mobile app on this framework that will offer more location-specific forecasts and personalised advice to the public on how to reduce exposure to bad air.
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“The key words here are ‘personalised and smart, timely and interactive’. Telling me how bad the air is after I breath it is useless – I want to know right now,” Li said. “If in the afternoon I want to go to Mong Kok, I want to know the forecast for the air there this afternoon.”