From 29 November to 1 December, we had the privilege of hosting three exceptional student poster presentation sessions for CENG 1600 Biotechnology and Its Business Opportunities and CHEM 4689 Capstone Project. These sessions were a testament to the remarkable collaborative efforts between our esteemed faculty and dedicated librarians, whose fruitful partnerships have flourished since 2018 and 2016, respectively. In addition to providing the LG4 multi-function room as the venue for these presentations, our SciTech Librarians have been unwavering in their commitment to supporting the CENG 1600 and CHEM 4689 courses. They offered tailored workshops, equipping students with quality search tools and effective strategies to locate relevant and reliable information sources. Emphasizing the ethical and responsible use of information sources, our workshops covered essential aspects such as proper citation, copyright compliance, and creative commons licensing. Moreover, our librarians extended personalized consultation sessions to assist students with their research endeavors (CHEM 4689) and provided a rubric to facilitate the evaluation of the students' poster presentations (CENG 1600). Throughout the research process until the final presentation, students acquired invaluable skills in critical thinking and analysis, enabling them to translate their ideas into thoughtfully designed posters. The insightful feedback received from faculty members, librarians, and peers further enriched their understanding of various research domains. The collective creativity and enthusiasm displayed by the students left our faculty, teaching assistants, and librarians absolutely thrilled! We take immense pride in our commitment to supporting our students and faculty members in their academic pursuits.

Recently, Mr. Aaron Tay, a librarian from Singapore Management University gave us a guest talk on RAG-based LLM applications for academic literature search. This post summarizes the key insights in the presentation.

Meet the Team behind the Library's Systems and Digital Services! Franky, Joey, Adrian, Andrew, Leo, Sam, Terry, Martin, and Holly.   Among many other things, they manage over 55 computer servers with well over 70 individual applications – from simple things like LDAP identity lookup to complex beasts like our Room Booking System. Most of those servers have been running on CentOS7, which will reach its end-of-life by this coming Summer. Since these applications are mission critical, all these servers need to be upgraded to a new OS (operating system). That is a crazy big job to manage, when every application has to be tested and adjusted to work on the new server. All the people in that photo are heroes to me. Except the guy in the red jacket – that's me and I just offer support and encouragement. Everyone else there does the real work. To make things more complicated, several of the larger applications need to be upgraded just to work on the new OS - a double set of upgrades!

String comparison is a key step in data pre-processing, but functions in Excel such as MATCH and VLOOKUP falter in fuzzy string matching. In this post, let’s explore how the Python library "FuzzyWuzzy" overcomes these limitations.

If you look, you often find wonders at the Library – big and small, indoors and outdoors. Admire this full moon captured on November 27 by my colleague Ada, Head of Resource Management.  It was taken from the Library Garden.  Doesn't it put us all in awe? I am entranced every time I see the Moon rise over the sea by our campus. At HKUST, you can find many spots that give you an open view facing east, such as the lookout at Atrium ("Mushroom Window") and the Fok Ying Tung Sports Center at Seafront. To me, my favourite spot is of course the Library Garden! When the weather is comfortable, like recent days, the Library Garden is a beautiful place to take a break from your study, to have some fresh air, to hang out with friends, or just to have some time alone with the view, daytime or night. And, don't forget, you can say "Hello" to George too! Ada took this poetic photo a little after 6pm.