After relocating to PolyU in August 2016, he focused on winning large research funding for establishing a sustainable fire safety engineering research group at PolyU. His track record in leading the FireGrid project (from 2006 to 2009) at the University of Edinburgh was of critical importance in winning the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) Theme-based Research Scheme funding for his proposed project “SureFire: Smart Urban Resilience and Firefighting”.
The FireGrid project successfully demonstrated the feasibility of forecasting the evolution of a fire in a residential apartment as part of a “distributed” emergency response system framework. However, while forecasting the evolution of a fire at the scale of an average-sized room was possible within the timescale of emergency response as simplified tools exist for modelling such fires, forecasting fire evolution in large building compartments and other civil infrastructure is not possible based on the tools used in FireGrid. SureFire is therefore focused on developing a critical event forecasting capability using AI and machine learning based tools trained on a large data repository of fires from many experimental and computational fluid dynamics simulations. Around 15 patents and 60 journal papers have resulted from this project and roughly 10 PhD students graduated so far, some of whom are faculty members in Fire Safety Engineering of leading international universities. The SureFire project has led to the creation at PolyU of the largest Fire Safety Engineering research group in the world, currently comprising 5 faculty, 15 postdocs and 30 PhD students, helping to ensure the sustainability of this research and its leadership at PolyU for the foreseeable future.
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