Libraries, Digital Education and Campus Services

How does a university that only broke ground in 1991 manage, in just over three decades, to assemble East Asia's largest special collection of early Western printed maps of China, while also claiming several "firsts" — among the first Asian partners of Coursera, Hong Kong's first blockchain-issued diplomas, and the city's first whole-university net-zero action plan? This chapter is a hub-level overview of HKUST's knowledge infrastructure: libraries, online education, generative-AI teaching, the smart campus and campus services each get a section, with verifiable figures and dates supplied throughout, while the finer detail is routed to the dedicated articles in this module.

This is an overview piece. For the library's archives and special collections, see Lee Shau Kee Library, University Archives and Special Collections^※; for learning spaces and 3D printing, see Learning Commons and the "Third-Generation" Library^※; for the full story of blockchain credentials, see Blockchain-Verified Academic Credentials^※; and for academic publishing and continuing education, see Publishing, Academic Progression and Continuing Education^※.

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# 1. Lee Shau Kee Library

# 1.1 Naming and donation

The library's main building is named after Dr Lee Shau Kee, one of Hong Kong's leading property developers, and was formally styled "Lee Shau Kee Library" in 2006^※. Dr Lee's philanthropic support for the University has spanned many years; a HK$400 million donation announced on 20 March 2007^※ funded the Lee Shau Kee Business Building and further campus development, and earned him the title of Founding Protector of the Institute for Advanced Study. The library was established together with the University in 1991, making it one of the first academic libraries in Hong Kong to run a networked bilingual (Chinese–English) catalogue system. Putting Lee's name on the main library building is both a缩影 of the University's "donate-and-name" tradition (see Donors and Naming^※) and a way of elevating a building that has been in use since the University opened to the symbolic centre of campus academic life. For a university founded on research, the library has never been merely a study hall; it is a hub in the chain of knowledge production.

# 1.2 Collections by the numbers

The library completed an expansion in 2011–2012, adding roughly 1,800 square metres and remodelling an equivalent area to create the Learning Commons with over 600 seats, organised into five functional zones: group discussion, open study, dining, teaching and creative media. During the autumn and spring terms it is open 24 hours a day. This transformation from "book warehouse" to "place for learning and creation", along with the pay-per-gram pricing of the 3D-printing maker services, is covered in detail in Learning Commons and the "Third-Generation" Library^※.

It is worth noting that the electronic collection (about 1.88 million e-books and over 230,000 streaming items) now far outnumbers print. This is consistent with HKUST's engineering- and science-led identity from its founding, with faculty and students heavily reliant on journal databases and online resources. The library's centre of gravity has long since shifted from "storing paper" to "buying access and building learning spaces".

# 1.3 University Archives & Special Collections

# Western Maps of China Project

The HKUST Library holds the largest collection in East Asia of early Western printed maps of China as a dedicated special collection^※, comprising over 300 European printed maps, images and atlases of China from the 16th to the 19th century, donated chiefly by Dr Ko Pui Shuen. The project also runs an online catalogue website (mappasinica.hkust.edu.hk) offering high-resolution digital images of 127 maps; the associated scholarly output has been compiled into the first critical bibliography of Chinese maps (covering 1584–1735).

# Ko Pui Shuen Gallery of the Hong Kong Chiu Chow Chamber of Commerce

On 29 November 2013, the Ko Pui Shuen Gallery opened on the first floor of the library^※, built with a HK$3 million donation from Dr Ko Pui Shuen^※. The gallery displays rare early maps of China and treasured works in the history of science, including the first European map of China printed by Abraham Ortelius in 1584, alongside original editions of Euclid, Galileo and Newton^※. Ortelius's map was the first time Europeans depicted China on a single dedicated sheet, turning the cross-cultural theme of "China on old maps" into something you can hold in your hands.

# Other special collections

• Early East Asian maps: Chinese court maps and historical atlases of East Asia
• Rare books in the history of European science: over 500 volumes spanning 500 years of landmark scientific works
• Pre-1949 Western writings on China: works by missionaries, explorers and diplomats from the 16th to the 20th century
• Paul T. K. Lin archives: personal papers of the political scientist Paul Lin Ta-kuang (1920–2004)

These collections were not assembled at random. They converge on a single theme — the modern encounter between China and the West: the Western maps record how Europeans gradually "saw" China; the European scientific rare books carry the knowledge threads of the Scientific Revolution from the same era; and the pre-1949 Western writings preserve slices of China as seen through the eyes of missionaries, explorers and diplomats. For a young university built on science and technology, gathering such a body of humanities and history-of-science treasures in one place is itself a statement of self-positioning: strong in technology, but not to the exclusion of the humanities.

All of the above can be searched online via the Rare & Special e-Zone (lbezone.hkust.edu.hk); digitisation began in April 2013. This is part of the same "digitise everything that can be digitised" approach as the MOOCs and blockchain credentials: turning scarce physical resources into publicly accessible goods. The University Archives (established 1996) also holds over 1,200 linear feet of institutional records, which together with the special collections form the primary sources for this site's historical research. Its named collections — including the Shafei photograph collection and correspondence between Soong Ching-ling and Paul Lin — are detailed in Lee Shau Kee Library, University Archives and Special Collections^※.

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# 2. Digital Education and MOOCs

# 2.1 MOOC platforms

HKUST's partnership with Coursera began in late 2012^※, making it the first Asian university on the platform^※. It subsequently added edX under the brand HKUSTx, and launched its first courses in 2013^※. Running on both platforms, the courses have drawn a cumulative total of over 4 million learners worldwide across roughly 80 free courses.

The course portfolio spans free single courses, Specializations and credit-bearing MicroMasters programmes. Representative offerings include:

• FinTech: Finance Industry Transformation and Regulation
• Business English for Non-Native Speakers
• The Science of Gastronomy (led by a biologist, unpacking cooking through biological, chemical and physical principles; over 83,000 enrolled in its first run, making it one of HKUST's most popular MOOCs)
• The Big Data Technology MicroMasters, plus Specializations in software engineering, semiconductor devices, protecting business innovation and others

This online-course programme sits naturally alongside the University's decision not to run a traditional university press, preferring an institutional repository for scholarly dissemination (see Publishing, Academic Progression and Continuing Education^※). Both reflect a preference for exporting knowledge through lean, digital means. The MOOC strategy is managed by the Center for Education Innovation (CEI), which also handles blended learning, course redesign and faculty development — a role that became considerably heavier once generative AI arrived (see the next section).

But outward-facing courses are only one side of the coin; the other is feeding these online materials back into on-campus classrooms. At HKUST, MOOCs and blended learning feed each other: globally facing open courses use Canvas as the campus learning-management system to become blended courses, while the online content accumulated in blended courses can in turn seed new MOOCs^※. The "flipped classroom" model — students watch recorded lectures before class and spend class time on discussion and hands-on work — thus has a ready supply of material. This is a layer of internal return on the MOOC investment: it is not just an external branding exercise, but an internal reform of teaching.

# 2.2 Blockchain-verified academic credentials

In June 2020, HKUST became the first university in Hong Kong to issue blockchain-verified digital diplomas^※, using the open Blockcerts standard to generate cryptographically signed anti-forgery e-certificates. In November 2020 the system was extended to e-transcripts.

Third parties can verify a certificate's authenticity at registry.ust.hk/verify/info without going through any intermediary. Any tampering invalidates the certificate's hash and is immediately detectable. Built on the Blockcerts open standard from the MIT Media Lab, the platform flips degree verification from "ask the university to confirm" to "anyone can check for themselves". The technical details and its interplay with HKUST's broader blockchain teaching and research ecosystem are covered in Blockchain-Verified Academic Credentials^※.

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# 3. Generative AI Enters the Classroom

# 3.1 A policy that delegates to departments

When ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, universities around the world quickly split into "ban" and "embrace" camps. HKUST chose the latter, and did so earlier and more systematically than most of its peers: it was among the first universities globally to give faculty and students access to a protected ChatGPT service^※. What really reveals its stance is the design logic of the classroom policy — rather than imposing a top-down "allowed/not allowed" rule, the University has, since the autumn term of the 2023–24 academic year, delegated generative-AI policy to individual course instructors, letting each decide according to the nature of the course, with the requirement that the chosen policy be communicated to students in writing^※. Within the same university, a writing-intensive general-education course may ban AI outright, while a programming course may encourage students to treat it as a pair-programming assistant. This "policy per course" arrangement is the direct consequence of the delegation design.

The key to a "protected" service is separating faculty and students from the public consumer chatbot: by routing model access through institutional channels, the University keeps a handle on data privacy, content compliance and access management, so that assignments, exam questions and unpublished research are not fed directly into a public-facing product. For a university, this is both the convenience of "letting people use cutting-edge tools" and the defence of "holding the line on academic and data boundaries". That HKUST built this channel early is consistent with its habitual posture of being first with technology.

# 3.2 How faculty and students actually use it — and what they think

Beyond the delegated policy, HKUST has left an unusually solid empirical record. A survey study conducted across the Clear Water Bay and Guangzhou campuses in November 2023, covering 680 students^※, systematically captured student usage of and attitudes towards generative AI. Framed around "embracing rather than containing", the study documents a widespread ambivalence between gains in efficiency and concerns about academic integrity and overdependence. Set against the broader context, industry surveys commonly report AI-tool usage rates among students at elite universities in the region of 90%. In other words, the institutional question was never really "whether to allow" — it was "how to draw the integrity line within usage that is already an established fact".

To support this, CEI has built an entire support ecosystem, organised into categories such as guidelines and policies, learning resources, AI-tool access, assessment design, content design, prompt engineering, and ethics and responsible use, and has developed in-house tools such as HKUST AI Co-designer to help faculty redesign assignments and assessments for a world in which AI is already present. This path — "the institution provides the framework; faculty and students adapt" — echoes a pattern visible across HKUST's residential education and arts ecosystems: respect existing practice first, then channel it through institutional structures.

Across the region, universities have struck very different postures towards generative AI — regulatory stances and degrees of openness vary widely, from mainland China to Japan, Mongolia and the United States (comparative studies of these cross-national policies are available in the academic literature). HKUST sits near the open end of that spectrum: rather than keeping AI outside the gate, it treats AI as a fait accompli and absorbs it through the combination of "policy per course + integrity bottom line + faculty support". This stance fits its research-intensive, engineering-led institutional DNA, and made it one of the most frequently cited case studies in policy research during 2023–2024.

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# 4. Smart Campus IT Infrastructure

# 4.1 Network infrastructure

The Clear Water Bay campus runs on a 10-gigabit Ethernet backbone connecting over 300 aggregation switches across more than 170 telecom rooms, and has completed a full upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), rolled out in six phases, the first completed in 2020. The campus now has over 6,000 wireless access points, putting its coverage and capacity among the best of Hong Kong's universities. The dense access-point and IoT network is also the data source for the digital-twin and sensor projects described below.

# 4.2 Research computing: from HPC clusters to the SuperPOD AI supercomputer

Research computing support is provided centrally by the Information Technology Services Center (ITSO). With the generative-AI wave, the centre of gravity of this infrastructure has shifted decisively towards GPUs. HKUST SuperPOD is an AI-focused supercomputing platform built on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD H800 system, offered as a central university research facility open to all researchers; the University states it can complete a GPT-3-scale training task in roughly one hour^※. Traditional scientific computing is handled by HPC4, the fourth-generation high-performance computing cluster, which went into production in mid-October 2024 with 200Gbps RoCE interconnects between nodes and 5.4PB of Dell PowerScale storage^※. The pairing of one AI supercomputer and one general-purpose HPC cluster puts HKUST's "technology first" self-expectation into the most concrete possible form: raw compute.

# 4.3 Sustainable Smart Campus as Living Lab

HKUST positions its main campus as a "Sustainable Smart Campus as a Living Lab" (SSC)^※, testing sustainable technologies in the real campus environment — students, faculty and operations staff try out prototypes together in an actual setting, then decide whether to scale up. Technologies deployed include:

• LoRaWAN low-power wide-area IoT network (923 MHz, Hong Kong's standard band)
• 3D digital modelling of the campus
• Campus air-quality intelligent monitoring network (SCAN)
• Passive radiative cooling coating
• Integrated aquaculture system
• Smart sleep pods
• Real-time dashboards for renewable energy and resource savings (about 784 kWh of renewable energy generated per day, roughly 502 plastic bottles saved daily, and about 88 tonnes of waste recycled monthly)

These are not lab samples; they are installed directly on the campus that faculty and students walk through every day. Projects selected in recent years include growing fresh vegetables on campus via an aquaponics system, improving staff and student rest with sleep pods, easing grid strain through smart EV charging coordination, and a "tree-like" solar transpiration system that regulates building humidity^※. The passive radiative cooling coating uses special materials to radiate building heat into the sky, saving air-conditioning energy. This approach — "validate on the real campus first, then decide whether to scale" — is the core of the living-lab concept: the campus itself is the first test bed for sustainable technology.

# 4.4 Digital Twin: a real-time copy of the campus

The flagship SSC project is a virtual model of the entire campus that updates in real time. HKUST's Digital Twin platform builds on two early phases in 2019 and 2021^※, feeding real-time data from building systems, sensors and environmental monitoring into a single three-dimensional campus model. The upgraded Digital Twin+ goes further, integrating data from various IoT systems and opening real-time campus information to faculty, students and operations staff. In 2025 the University selected eight projects from a new round of SSC initiatives for campus pilots^※, covering energy efficiency, renewable-energy optimisation, water management, health, ecology and predictive maintenance — and the digital twin is the hub that stitches these scattered data streams into one operable picture.

Looking across the 2019, 2021 and 2025 phases, the digital twin's role has evolved: early work focused on "rendering the campus as a 3D model", while later work shifted towards "making the model breathe in real time" — plugging in ever more IoT data streams, then adding robotics and AI so that the virtual copy is not just an attractive display but can feed back into the real campus's energy scheduling, fault warning and maintenance planning. For a university that treats its campus as a living lab, this real-time replica is simultaneously a research subject, an operations tool, and teaching material that gives students hands-on access to a real system — three birds with one stone. The SuperPOD and HPC4 computing power described above provides the underlying support for exactly this kind of data-intensive, model-intensive campus intelligence.

# 4.5 Net-zero campus: Hong Kong's first whole-university net-zero action plan

The smart-campus technology narrative ultimately lands on a concrete decarbonisation target. HKUST is the first university in Hong Kong to publish a comprehensive net-zero action plan^※, committing to reach university-wide net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2045^※ and investing HK$30 million (from renewable-energy proceeds) to accelerate campus decarbonisation research and applications.

Part of the plan is expanding on-campus renewable-energy installations, including a colourful building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system on existing student halls described as the "first of its kind in Hong Kong". Notably, by 2023 the University had already cut emissions by about 38% from the 2014 baseline — within striking distance of the near-term 2028 target of 40% — which suggests the net-zero commitment is not just a declaration but is backed by verifiable interim progress. The plan also sets aside around HK$30 million in a decarbonisation innovation fund, extending the "campus as test bed" logic to low-carbon technology R&D itself. Net-zero construction, like the paperless blockchain diplomas and the digital twin, is another facet of HKUST's "technology first" institutional culture. The green campus's ecology and expansion story is covered separately in Green Campus^※.

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# 5. Research Funding and the Hong Kong Higher-Education Landscape

# 5.1 The UGC Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2020)

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is the UGC's periodic peer review of research quality across the eight UGC-funded universities — Hong Kong's version of the research "big exam". RAE 2020 assessed about 16,000 research outputs, 340 impact case studies and 190 research environment statements submitted by around 4,200 eligible staff across Hong Kong, covering work from October 2013 to September 2019, with 361 assessors in 13 subject panels^※.

In that exercise, of the outputs submitted by HKUST's 446 eligible staff, over 81% were rated "internationally excellent" or "world leading", and about 90% of its research impact case studies were judged "considerable" or "outstanding"^※. HKUST participated in 9 of the 13 panels and took first place among all Hong Kong universities in the proportion of "world-leading" outputs in five subject areas:

1. Physical sciences
2. Electrical and electronic engineering
3. Built environment
4. Business and economics
5. Social sciences

RAE ratings use a four-star scale, with "world leading" (4 stars) and "internationally excellent" (3 stars) as the top two grades, which directly affect future UGC research funding allocations. For a university founded in 1991, far junior in "seniority" to HKU and CUHK in this exercise, taking first place in the proportion of world-leading outputs in five of the nine panels in which it participated is a concentrated vindication of its research-focused positioning in an institutionalised review. The result also corroborates HKUST's long-standing strength in international rankings, especially the "young university" tables (see Hong Kong's Tertiary Landscape Compared^※).

# 5.2 Positioning within Hong Kong's university landscape

Hong Kong has eight UGC-funded universities: the University of Hong Kong (1911), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1963), the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (predecessor 1972), City University of Hong Kong (predecessor 1984), Hong Kong Baptist University (predecessor 1956), Lingnan University and the Education University of Hong Kong. HKUST is the only one founded explicitly as a research university with no predecessor institution, modelled from its inception on the American research-university pattern. How this "built from scratch" research orientation positions it among the eight, and how the UGC/RGC/QAC three regulatory systems divide their labour, is covered in Hong Kong's Tertiary Landscape Compared — HKUST's place among the eight^※.

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# 6. Language Policy

HKUST's academic language policy has been English-medium instruction (EMI) since its founding: all courses are taught and assessed in English unless individually approved otherwise by the Senate^※. The policy was most recently revised and formally confirmed in August 2021, and HKUST is one of the eight UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong that enforces full English-medium teaching. The all-English environment serves both its international faculty–student structure and its research-focused positioning, and is the linguistic precondition for the globally facing MOOCs and for attracting non-local students.

To be clear, "full English-medium instruction" is not absolute: subjects where language itself is the object of study — Chinese, foreign languages and the like — along with a small number of courses approved case by case by the Senate, may be taught in other languages. The policy governs the default language, not the only language. Functionally, EMI is an institutional asset: it lowers the language barrier for international faculty and students, lets courses plug directly into global student pools and partner institutions, and is a natural convenience in international rankings and cross-border research collaborations. Compared with older comprehensive universities that have higher proportions of local students and where some courses can flexibly use Cantonese or Putonghua, HKUST has written "English as the academic lingua franca" into its institutional skeleton from day one — inseparable from its origins as a university with no predecessor, built from scratch on the American research-university template (see Hong Kong's Tertiary Landscape Compared^※).

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# 7. Campus Dining Culture

The Clear Water Bay campus's diverse dining facilities are managed by the Campus Services Office (CSO)^※ under an outsourced model with multiple contractors per venue — within a single canteen, several caterers often operate side by side in competition, which helps keep prices and quality in check. The main facilities include:

• LG7 student canteen: the largest, run by several caterers including Asia Pacific Catering (APC), Golden Rice Bowl (GRB) and Milano Fresh, each operating its own counters^※, offering a mix of Chinese and Western food in large portions at low prices — roughly HK$20–45 for a single meal — and serving for years as the everyday staple for undergraduates
• LG5 food court: with McDonald's, Japanese, Thai, Chinese and Italian outlets
• China Garden: a full-table-service Chinese restaurant that hosts banquets
• UniQue: international Western dining with a view over Tolo Harbour
• UniBistro: Mediterranean dishes and a salad bar
• Coffee brands: Starbucks, McCafé, Passione (French pastries) and Pacific Coffee
• Fast-food counters: Subway, Ebeneezer's (halal kebabs), TamJai SamGor (谭仔三哥 rice noodles), UniVeggie (vegetarian) and others

Two orientations can be read from this list. First, catering to a diverse faculty–student body — halal kebabs, a vegetarian counter and multiple national cuisines side by side, matching the high proportion of international and mainland-China students. Second, a dual track of "fast-food chains + budget canteens": branded outlets like Starbucks, McDonald's and Pacific Coffee meet immediate needs, while LG7-type canteens provide the low-cost, high-volume bottom line for students. Caterers are replaced every few years through tender — the routine mechanism for keeping competition and quality alive — and the occasional change of a stallholder prompting student discussion of prices and tastes is part of campus life, not an incident.

This outsourced system operates smoothly overall, with no confirmed major food-safety incidents on record over the years; this site's review of canteen supervision mechanisms and occasional complaints is in Canteen Food Safety^※ (a dedicated food-safety module), and is not expanded here.

Separately, the campus is home to the Tsang Shiu Tim Art Hall (named in 2010 following a HK$20 million donation)^※, a multipurpose performance-arts and exhibition venue of about 450 square metres. The Center for the Arts (CFA) is located on LG3 and runs exhibitions, concerts, film screenings and the annual "HKUST Arts Festival" (since 2010) throughout the year. The Shaw Auditorium, completed in 2021, filled a long-standing gap in formal performance venues at HKUST; the student arts ecosystem that has grown up around it is covered in Arts and Cultural Life^※.

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# Further Reading

• Lee Shau Kee Library, University Archives and Special Collections^※ — the primary source for old maps, rare books and university archives
• Learning Commons and the "Third-Generation" Library^※ — learning spaces, 3D printing and maker services
• Blockchain-Verified Academic Credentials^※ — the technology and backstory of Hong Kong's first anti-forgery e-diplomas
• Publishing, Academic Progression and Continuing Education^※ — the institutional repository and continuing-education architecture
• Hong Kong's Tertiary Landscape Compared^※ — HKUST's research-focused position among the eight universities
• Arts and Cultural Life^※ — the Shaw Auditorium and student arts groups

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