Pan Hui

Pan Hui is a computer scientist at the University of Helsinki and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Currently, he is a Chair Professor of Computational Media and Arts (CMA), a Chair Professor of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas, Director of the Center for Metaverse and Computational Creativity, and also Director of the HKUST-DT Systems and Media Laboratory (SyMLab) at HKUST. He was elected as an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2020, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (FIEEE), a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE), and a Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has been elected to the endowed professorship Nokia Chair in Data Science.

Research
Hui is recognized as a foundational researcher in the field of networking and communications, especially in mobile computing and networking. His work spans a wide spectrum from foundational work on mobility characterization and networking approaches, to the design and development of software systems, to conceptualization and deployment of innovative applications. With the envision of a perceived virtual universe that is rich in 'Surreality', he has been leading the cutting-edge research on Metaverse, making global impact on shaping the future of Metaverse development.

Opportunistic Networking
Hui has extensively contributed to the foundation of opportunistic networking, including empirical measurements, mobility modeling, bridging mobile networks with social networks, and innovative applications. He is considered a pioneer in bridging the mobile and social networks research fields. In particular, on the conceptual front, he elucidated the connection between social networks and mobile networks. On the empirical side, by measuring human mobility and contact patterns, he laid the foundation for the use of mobility traces as a means for validating models that are widely used for performance evaluation. His papers published at ACM SIGCOMM workshop 2005 (over 1,350 citations by Jan 2023) and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 2007 (over 2,030 citations by Jan 2023) empirically demonstrated that the human mobility inter-contact time follows a power-law distribution, rather than a commonly-believed exponential distribution.

Mobile Offloading
Hui's work in mobile offloading at Deutsche Telekom has resulted in three practical systems for mobile traffic offloading from cellular networks to both WiFi networks and device-to-device networks and also for computation offloading from smartphones and wearable devices to the cloud and edge servers. His ThinkAir paper on a mobile cloud offloading system (a result from a Deutsche Telekom innovation development project), with over 1400 citations by Jan 2023, is the most cited paper in IEEE Infocom 2012 conference and the system is widely adopted by the mobile cloud/edge computing community.

Metaverse
In terms of metaverse, Hui envisions a perceived virtual universe that is rich in 'Surreality', and is a result of a series of connected, shared, and concurrent 3D virtual spaces that are self-sustaining. Following this vision, he has been leading the Metaverse research that makes a global impact on shaping the future of Metaverse development. In terms of technology, his bottom-up approach to Augmented Reality (AR) research has resulted in an open software CloudAR which contains a platform and an SDK to speed up mobile AR development by an order of magnitude. He has also invented many innovative AR/VR applications including augmented driving, gesture control, social interaction, visual privacy protection, and assisted applications for the elderly and the visually impaired.

He proposed and defined the concept of "Metaformation" (or "Meta-shaping") as the process of transforming physical space into a hybrid physical-digital Metaverse, which facilitates the cohabitation of both human and digital natives, wherein the virtual world interacts and coexists with the physical world and results in a highly engaging and seamless experience. He also served as a member in the Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse in the World Economic Forum.

Hui is leading one of the key projects at HKUST, 'MetaHKUST', to bring two HKUST campuses (Clear Water Bay and Guangzhou) together and consolidate the real and virtual experience in one platform. The MetaHKUST project is receiving international press coverage and highlights the use of the metaverse in the education and learning industry. In 2024, Hui led a team to introduce Asia's First 'AI Lecturers' in Class. They develop 10 AI lecturers with different combinations of gender, age, and race using a self-developed variational 3D full-body generator combined with multiple AI tools including Midjourney, ChatGPT, Sadtalker, and the team's enhanced version of the open-source 3D facial animation tool EmoTalk. In his 'Social Media for Creatives' course, these AI lecturers are used to teach 30 postgraduate students about immersive technologies and the impact of digital platforms.