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South China Morning Post
09-03-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: 5 women leading the way in STEM, a woman who started a brewery at 18, and a trip to Luang Prabang in Laos
I am laughably bad at maths. I like to think of it as an endearing quality – a framing only possible because I live in an era of calculators on mobile phones. And to my credit, once you put letters in there, shockingly I improve. Calculus and trigonometry? I could scrape by in high school. Splitting a bill at the end of dinner? Don't look at me. Advertisement So, there's no one I'm more in awe of than women in mathematics, science and related disciplines, and the topic immediately sprang to mind when we were discussing how to mark International Women's Day in an editorial meeting a few months back. But, to be honest, we were conflicted about the idea on the whole. International Women's Day is somewhat of a Hallmark holiday – cringeworthy promotions abound, the critical issues get overlooked and the descent is quick into 'rah rah, girl power' territory. We wanted to make sure we championed the brilliant women innovating in their fields, but we also didn't want to shy away from discussing the hard questions, the challenges and the solutions. After the cover shoot, we brought our five cover stars – Florence Chan, Angela Wu, Wendy Lam, Gina Jiang and Megan Lam – together for a round-table discussion of women in STEM, which you can read in its edited and condensed form. It ended up being one of the most provocative and enjoyable Friday afternoons I've had in a long while. The work they are doing is fascinating and while we didn't solve the world's problems in a single conversation, I learned so much from their insights and approaches. A sincere thanks to Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, which supported this editorial feature. Anushka Purohit, of Breer, the food upcycling start-up that turns leftover bread into beer, shares about being a woman founder in a male-dominated industry. Who would have guessed that about beer brewing? And there was the challenge of youth, too. Purohit was 18 when she started the company five years ago. One point our cover stars touched on in conversation is that science and technology shouldn't be so siloed from art and humanities. It ought to be STEAM not STEM, they laughed. Artists, for their part, haven't shied away from using technology. Aaina Bhargava talks to South Korean artist Inhwa Yeom, who uses artificial intelligence as a foundational element of her practice. She's showing as part of 'Future Tense', an exhibition that explores Hong Kong's cultural heritage reimagined in the future. Advertisement That reimagining is, of course, all speculative. How can we actually predict what something will look like in the future? Ron Gluckman first visited Luang Prabang in the early 1990s and could he have imagined what it would look like now? He traces the city's evolution as a destination over 30 years. One for the bucket list, especially with its 'Sundance of Southeast Asia' film festival.
South China Morning Post
07-03-2025
- Health
- South China Morning Post
Florence Chan's award-winning AI vision tool helps the blind navigate their world
Great minds blazing a trail: meet the women who are leading the way in the realm of science and invention. Advertisement In 2019, Florence Chan was in the third year of her PhD in biomedical engineering. Her research focused on using artificial-intelligence vision to recognise the status of cells , differentiating between stem cells, cancerous and healthy ones. She was impressed with how efficient AI was in recognising their subtle differences. One day, while taking a break from the lab, she was strolling through a shopping centre when she spotted a group of visually impaired people navigating the mall with the traditional tools of the blind: canes and guide dogs. She wondered, 'Could AI vision support them?' That penny-drop moment catapulted her into action and soon she was in touch with the Hong Kong Society for the Blind and speaking to the visually impaired about what could best help them. Tools available in Europe and the United States that rely on GPS don't work well in densely populated cities such as Hong Kong, because of interference from multiple devices. Chan was already having a busy year. Pregnant with her first child, she spent her maternity leave preparing a business proposal for an incubation programme, pitching it to the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. It worked, and in 2020, she co-founded AI Guided, aiming to create a device that allowed AI to be eyes for the visually impaired. Beginning with a rough idea on paper, she and her team worked through 20 prototypes over five years. They experimented with devices that could be worn on the chest and head, or as glasses, and eventually settled on a belt. The GUIDi Smart Belt is designed to be worn around the waist and scan the surrounding area with AI vision technology. Photo: Elson Li The GUIDi Smart Belt is worn around the waist and scans the surrounding area with advanced AI vision technology. It emits gentle vibrations from various points on the belt, warning the user of obstacles ahead, allowing them to walk with confidence.
