FB e-bulletin June 2021

e-Bulletin June 2021

Faculty Performs Well in RAE 2020

The Faculty scored good ratings in the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) conducted by the University Grants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong.

According to the Business and Economics panel, 23.5% of our submissions were judged to have met the four-star standard (world-leading) and 39.2% were considered three-star (internationally excellent). By Unit of Assessment, 34% of the Faculty's research in Accountancy were rated four-star and 42% were rated three-star. Our research in Business has 33% of submissions rated four-star and 42% rated three-star.

RAE 2020 is a criterion-referenced assessment, against agreed quality levels defined by international standards, covering research outputs completed during October 2013 to September 2019. The results will be used to inform the allocation of part of the Research Portion of the Block Grant to UGC-funded universities.

Accounting and Finance Team is Champion in Asia Pacific Regional Semi-finals of CFA Institute Research Challenge

Since winning the Hong Kong local final of the CFA Institute Research Challenge in February, the four-member team from the School of Accounting and Finance (AF) went on to clinch championship in the Asia Pacific Subregional competition and championship in the Asia Pacific Regional Semi-finals held in April 2021. The team was made up of BBA students Miss Kennedy Jin Xiyang (Accounting and Finance), Mr Khoo Chen Kang (Financial Services), Miss Grace Lin Guanxiu (Accounting and Finance), and MSc in Accounting and Finance Analytics student Ms Dora Liu Tianmeiduo.

(From left) Jin Xiyang, Khoo Chen Kang, Lin Guanxiu, and Liu Tianmeiduo

The Research Challenge, hosted by the CFA Institute, is an annual global competition that provides university students with hands-on mentoring and intensive training in financial analysis. The AF team was one of the top four among 116 teams in the Asia Pacific region this year.

(From left) Zhang Yushan, He Tianqi, and Dr Hazel Lee (receiving championship on behalf of Amina Shalgymbayeva)

Three Students Win Leap to Success Virtual Challenge

Three BBA students won the Leap to Success Virtual Challenge hosted by the Faculty and organized by South China Morning Post’s Classified Post. Miss Amina Shalgymbayeva (Management) was the champion. Miss He Tianqi (Accountancy) was first runner-up and Miss Zhang Yushan (Marketing) was second runner-up.

The Challenge took place in two stages. In Stage one, the participants attended workshops on adopting an entrepreneurial attitude, embarking on a career, giving effective presentations, building a personal brand, and networking. They then wrote up inspiration from the workshops. In Stage two, each of the selected participants delivered a presentation on an entrepreneurial mindset and a successful career. The awards were presented in June 2021.

Faculty Students Serve as Graduating Class Ambassadors

Fifteen students from the School of Accounting and Finance, the Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, and the Department of Management and Marketing were appointed Graduating Class Ambassadors (GCAs) of the current year. They attended a briefing about their roles and met fellow ambassadors in mid-May 2021.

This year, around 200 final year students from faculties and schools of PolyU and Hong Kong Community College became GCAs committed to supporting the University in maintaining close ties with its alumni. They will keep regular communication with their classmates and promote PolyU events and alumni activities among them.

GCAs from the Faculty of Business and the Faculty of Applied Science and Textiles

Academic Promotions

Congratulations to the following faculty members on their promotions effective 1 July 2021.

School/Department	Staff	New Tank
School of Accounting and Finance	Dr Jungmin Kim	Associate Professor
Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies	Professor Kee-hung (Mike) Lai	Chair Professor
	Dr Miao Song	Professor
	Dr Shuaian (Hans) Wang	Professor
	Dr Hengqing Ye	Professor

Research Insights

A Branch-and-Price Algorithm for Facility Location with General Facility Cost Functions
INFORMS Journal on Computing, 33(1), 86–104 (2021)

Wenjun Ni, Southeast University
Jia Shu, Southeast University
Miao Song, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Dachuan Xu, Beijing University of Technology
Kaike Zhang, Southeast University

Most existing facility location models assume that the facility cost is either a fixed setup cost or made up of a fixed setup and a problem-specific concave or submodular cost term. This structural property plays a critical role in developing fast branch-and-price, Lagrangian relaxation, constant ratio approximation, and conic integer programming reformulation approaches for these NP-hard problems. Many practical considerations and complicating factors, however, can make the facility cost no longer concave or submodular. By removing this restrictive assumption, the authors study a new location model that considers general nonlinear costs to operate facilities in the facility location framework. The general model does not even admit any approximation algorithms unless P = NP because it takes the unsplittable hard-capacitated metric facility location problem as a special case. They first reformulate this general model as a set-partitioning model and then propose a branch-and-price approach. Although the corresponding pricing problem is NP-hard, they effectively analyse its structural properties and design an algorithm to solve it efficiently. The numerical results obtained from two implementation examples of the general model demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution approach, reveal the managerial implications, and validate the importance to study the general framework.

Dr Miao Song

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