EduAsiaNews, Hong Kong — A number of leading universities in Hong Kong have recorded a series of remarkable scientific achievements. These range from a breakthrough in solvent-free solar cell technology, a gene therapy innovation in the form of “nanoworms”, an artificial intelligence collaboration with the world’s top robotics companies, to the winning of dozens of awards at a prestigious international innovation exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland. These achievements further cement Hong Kong’s position as one of Asia’s most productive research and innovation hubs, transcending disciplinary boundaries and bridging the laboratory with the needs of global industry.
In the field of renewable energy, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) made history by developing perovskite solar cells produced entirely without chemical solvents, becoming the first in the world to receive official certification in this category. The findings, published in the journal Nature Materials on 23 February 2026, employed a multi-source co-evaporation technique by introducing lead chloride as a “co-source” to precisely control the growth and orientation of perovskite crystals, resulting in films far more resistant to heat and light degradation, with efficiency reaching 19.3 percent for single-junction cells and 27.2 percent for perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells.
“This co-evaporation method is directly compatible with existing thin-film deposition industrial infrastructure,” said Prof. Lin Yen-Hung, principal investigator from HKUST’s Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, to EurekAlert! last week. “This transforms vacuum deposition from a compromised alternative into the leading approach for producing high-performance and stable perovskite solar cells, offering a clear pathway from the laboratory to the factory floor.”
Meanwhile, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) signed a strategic partnership with three technology companies — Unitree Robotics, Noitom Robotics, and BrainCo — to accelerate the development of embodied intelligence on 28 February 2026 at HKU’s Zhangjiang Base in Shanghai. The collaboration focuses on whole-body motion control, dexterous manipulation, eye-hand-brain coordination, world-model navigation, and autonomous decision-making using vision-language models. The opening ceremony was marked by a demonstration by Unitree’s G1 humanoid robot, which performed a series of complex martial arts movements with remarkable precision. Prof. Yi Ma, Director of HKU’s School of Computing and Data Science and Chair Professor of Artificial Intelligence, stated that the joint laboratory aims to advance embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics beyond conceptual frameworks toward systematic, long-term collaborative research. Xinmin Tang, Co-founder and Vice President of Noitom Robotics, affirmed that “data has become the indispensable fuel for the embodied intelligence industry, yet breakthroughs are still needed in data alignment and quality control in multimodal data collection.” (**)
Sources: HKUST News & EurekAlert!; HKU Press Release; PolyU Media Release; Mirage News; Nature Materials Vol. 2026
