HKUST Annual Report 2024-2025

38 HKUST ANNUAL REPORT 2024-25 INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES Mega Image Dataset Opens Up Marine Realms Highlighting HKUST’s leading role in Marine AI, Prof. YEUNG Sai-Kit (Integrative Systems and Design, Computer Science and Engineering, and Ocean Science) and his team unveiled MarineInst20M, the largest marine image dataset to date, comprising 2.42 million images and 19.2 million masks. They also introduced MarineInst, a foundation model for marine visual analysis. Together, the dataset and model enable tasks ranging from image-level scene understanding to mask-level instance comprehension, serving both educational and analytical purposes for a broad community. MarineInst also achieves state-of-the-art performance in key applications such as marine object detection, underwater salient object segmentation, and image captioning. Revealing Nitrogen’s Leading Role in Global Organic Aerosol Absorption Prof. YU Jianzhen (Chemistry and Environment and Sustainability) co-led groundbreaking collaborative research leading to the introduction of a nitrogen-centric framework that explains the light-absorbing effects of atmospheric organic aerosols. The study reveals nitrogen-containing compounds play a dominant role in the absorption of sunlight by atmospheric organic aerosols worldwide. The discovery is a major advance toward improving climate models and developing more targeted strategies to mitigate climate impact of airborne particles. The collaborative team included researchers from HKUST, Southern University of Science and Technology and the National Center for Applied Mathematics Shenzhen.