A Fireside chat with Professor Steven Low, Professor Victor O.K. Li and Professor Jacqueline C.K. Lam on “The Blessings and Burdens of Interdisciplinary Research in AI for Social Good”

A Fireside chat with Professor Steven Low, Professor Victor O.K. Li and Professor Jacqueline C.K. Lam on "The Blessings and Burdens of Interdisciplinary Research in AI for Social Good"

Professor Steven Low
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Imperial College London
Professor Victor O.K. Li
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, HKU
Professor Jacquelie C.K. Lam
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, HKU

Description

WILLIAM MONG DISTINGUISHED LECTURES: RPG SHARING SERIES:

Interdisciplinary research has driven many of the most impactful advances in energy networks, from algorithms that keep modern power systems stable to market mechanisms that enable renewable integration at scale. But research that spans disciplinary boundaries also faces significant challenges: misaligned assumptions, incompatible methods, differing standards of evidence, and academic incentive structures that may undervalue work conducted at the intersection of fields.

In this fireside chat, Professor Steven Low, one of the world’s leading scholars in smart grids and networked energy systems, will be joined by Professor Victor O.K. Li and Professor Jacqueline C.K. Lam, Director and Co-Director of the HKU Lab on AI to Advance Well Being and Society, a key platform advancing AI for Social Good. Together, they will reflect on the blessings and bottlenecks of interdisciplinarity spanning energy networks, economics, and policy.

Through candid stories and practical lessons, the discussion will examine how interdisciplinary teams come together, how research questions are shaped to address societal and well-being challenges that are both scientifically deep and broad, and how those questions evolve under real operational constraints. The speakers will also explore how to translate mathematical insights into deployable deliverables, while navigating the hidden costs of collaboration, communication overhead, validation hurdles, and credit allocation, and the strategies that help: shared languages and principles, and methodologies.

Looking ahead, the session will consider what effective interdisciplinarity will look like in an era of distributed AI-enabled grid operations, while energy demand is increasingly shaped by AI driven data centres.

About the Speaker

Professor Steven Low is the F.J. Gilloon Professor of the Computing & Mathematical Sciences Department and Electrical Engineering Department at Caltech. Before that, he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held honorary/chaired professorship in Australia, China and other regions. He is an awardee of the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award and the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award, and a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and CSEE. He is well-known for work on Internet congestion control and optimal power flow problems in smart grid. His research has been deployed on the Internet for content distribution since 2012 and in the US for large-scale workplace electric vehicle charging since 2017. He is the author of Power System Analysis: Analytical Tools and Structural Properties (Cambridge 2026). He received his B.S. from Cornell and PhD from Berkeley, both in EE.

Professor Victor O.K. Li is formerly Chair of Information Engineering and Cheng Yu Tung Professor in Sustainable Development in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Hong Kong. He directs the HKU Cambridge Clean Energy and Environment Research Platform and the HKU Cambridge AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Platform, which connect engineering with environmental and health challenges through cross disciplinary collaboration. His work focuses on developing AI technologies that address major societal problems, including clean energy and environment, medicine and health, and smart city applications. Through these platforms, he advances AI for Social Good by bridging technical innovation with real world impact, translation pathways, and public value oriented research agendas.

Professor Jacqueline C.K. Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Hong Kong and co directs the HKU AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Hub and the HKU Cambridge AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Platform. Her research in AI for Social Good emphasizes the development and application of AI systems that prioritize fairness, interpretability, and value alignment. She is known for interdisciplinary work that brings together engineering with social sciences, neuroscience, and ethics to shape solutions that are technically rigorous and socially desirable. Her experience includes visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and MIT, reflecting a sustained commitment to cross institutional and cross sector collaboration.