At present, the Department has three research focus areas: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Future Wireless Networks and IoT, as well as Photonic Systems and Devices.

Besides serving/having served as associate editors of reputable international journals such as IEEE Transactions, our colleagues are serving/have served as the General / Technical Program Chairmen of some of the largest and most reputable international conferences such as IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, International Conference on Digital Signal Processing, Optoelectronics and Communications Conference, Pacific Rim Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, International Symposium on Turbo Codes & Iterative Information Processing. The department is also proud to have two professors being recognized as 2019 Highly Cited Researchers (HSR) in Cross-field and Materials Science, respectively.

In addition to receiving research grants from the state/government agents such as Hong Kong Research Grants Council (under General Research Fund, Theme-based Research Scheme, Collaborative Research Fund, and Research Impact Fund); Innovation and Technology Commission, HKSAR; National Natural Science Foundation, China; Ministry of Science and Technology, China; Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology; our professors have obtained large research funds from major hi-tech industry leaders including Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent. In particular, we have received $30M research funding from Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. over the years and have established a PolyU-Huawei Joint Laboratory for Optical Interconnection Network and Advanced Computing System --- the first joint laboratory of high-capacity optical communications and advanced computing systems in Hong Kong.