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Ark Junior Training Workshop

Event Details

Date : 7 Oct 2026 (Wed)

Time : 3:00pm – 4:30pm

Venue : Learning Lab (RRS 321, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Building, Main Campus, HKU)

Speaker : Prof. Zheng Zhang, Professor, School of Computing & Data Science,HKU; Founder and Chief Scientist, The HKU Shanghai Cross Innovation Lab

Note:

Please bring your laptop / notebook computer, a slide deck (with approximately 20 slides), an e-copy of reading, book chapter, or notes, and earphones to the workshop.

You could choose a deck on something you could teach to and share with a colleague outside your field - a seminar introduction, a talk you have given, a hiking trip and animations and all – not all needs to be kept but it will be nice that this is also a fun sharing. Some parents may build PPTs to share with other family members/friends a trip experience, or reading club members sharing their recent books.

Abstract

Teaching works when students ask. In a lecture hall few of them do: putting your hand up stops the room, and most students decide their question is not worth that. The AI-enabled platform “Ark Junior” takes the slides a teacher already has and turns them into a lecture a student can stop at any point to ask a question. Each answer is grounded to course material, and points back to the slide it came from. The Ark Junior does not replace a human-delivered lecture. It is meant as an extension: to lower students’ barrier to ask questions, and to give teachers a wider surface for working out backwards where students are struggling.

In this workshop, participants will first learn about how the Ark Junior operates, and will then leverage this platform to create their lecture and add questions to engage students. They will also play the role of a student to learn each other’s lesson and interact with their slides. The workshop will close with a short discussion of what they would do with the Ark Junior in a live class.

About the Speaker

Prof. Zheng Zhang (ZZ) is the Founder and Chief Scientist of The HKU Shanghai Cross Innovation Lab (HKU SH X-Lab), a research institute in Shanghai affiliated with the School of Computing & Data Science at The University of Hong Kong.

He was a Senior Principal Scientist and the Founding Director of the Amazon Web Services Shanghai AI Lab. He was also a Global Network Professor of Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, with affiliated appointments at the Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the NYU Center for Data Science at NYU’s New York campus. Previously, he founded the System Research Group and served as Principal Researcher and Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research Asia.

He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MS from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a BS from Fudan University. Zhang was a founder and advisor of several deep learning platforms, including MXNet, MinPy, and most recently DGL, which brings deep learning to graph applications. In 2025, he released LLM4LLM, an open-source self-learning course exploring new AI-era education.

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