On 29 April 2026, the inaugural academic forum “From OPENCLAW to Future Agentic AI Systems” hosted by the PolyU Academy for Artificial Intelligence (PAAI) was successfully held at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Focusing on the rise of agentic AI, the forum held in-depth discussions on key topics including OPENCLAW, security and privacy, human-AI collaboration and federated AI agents, attracting many participants.
The forum opened with a speech by Professor Christopher Chao, Senior Vice President (Research and Innovation) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He stated that the forum marked an important milestone for PAAI since its establishment in December 2025. The newly founded Research Institute for Federated Learning will focus on data privacy, security and collaborative intelligence, and promote the development of responsible artificial intelligence.
Professor Qiang Yang, Director of the PolyU Academy for Artificial Intelligence and the Research Institute for Federated Learning, delivered the keynote speech “On Future of AI and Federated AI”. He reviewed the challenges in AI development, such as data shortage, privacy leakage and multi-agent collaboration. He pointed out that federated learning and federated agents are key solutions, providing a framework for next-generation decentralised and privacy-preserving AI systems.
Professor Di Jiang, Associate Director of the Research Institute for Federated Learning, gave a presentation entitled “Building Robust AI Agents with OpenClaw”. He introduced OPENCLAW in detail, including its core architecture, technical advantages and application scenarios, explained why it has grown popular rapidly, and showed its value in teaching, research and daily assistance.
Professor Yang Liu, Co-Director of the Research Institute for Federated Learning, gave a presentation entitled “Federated Agents: A Future Private and Collaborative Paradigm”. She explained the federated agent technology thoroughly. She proposed this new privacy-preserving and decentralised paradigm, which keeps data and models local and realises multi-party intelligent collaboration without privacy leaks, offering a feasible path for the large-scale and secure use of agentic AI.
During the industry session, Dr Christine Huang, Founder of Quantum Life and Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (UK), gave a talk “Longevity Claw: Full-lifecycle healthy longevity concierge”, introducing the personalised health management system built on OPENCLAW. Dr Wang Hao, Senior Research Engineer at Huawei Hong Kong Research Center (HKRC), delivered a speech “Security of Agentic AI Systems: Taming the hybrid unicorn”, focusing on AI agent security and suggesting building a trusted scaffold to balance intelligence and controllability. Dr Chen Zhitang, Senior Researcher of Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, presented “Science Flow: A data science agent for new material design”, showing the automation and intelligentisation of material research. After the three industry talks, Professor Qiang Yang presented commemorative medals to each speaker.
At the end of the forum, Professor Qiang Yang delivered the closing speech. He summarised the key outcomes and looked forward to the future development of OPENCLAW, federated agents and fully autonomous agents. He hoped academia and industry would continue to work together to drive technological breakthroughs and practical applications of agentic AI.
The forum successfully built a communication platform for academic research and industrial practice, showed the development path of agentic AI from innovation to application, and laid a solid foundation for future research and co-operation in related fields.
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