The 10th Knowledge Management & E-Learning (KM&EL) Workshop has been organized by the Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) at Beijing Normal University (BNU) and the Laboratory for Knowledge Management & E-Learning (KM&EL Lab) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) successfully at Beijing Normal University. The theme of the workshop is: Network Science in Disaster and Public Health Preparedness . The workshop has attracted dozens of teachers and students from BNU. Prof. Yu Shengquan represented AICFE to welcome four scholars – Prof. Liaquat Hossain, Dr. Shihui Feng, Associate Professor Wang Minhong, and Jiang Haijing from HKU to share their latest research findings. Prof. Liaquat Hossain is the Head of Division of Information and Technology Studies, Faculty of Education, HKU. His research deals with disaster/crisis management and resilience for dealing with disasters Dr. Shihui Feng works as an assistant lecturer in Division of Information and Technology Studies, Faculty of Education, HKU. She studies the network dynamics in dealing with disaster.
At 9 am, the international project coordinator of AICFE Jiachen Song introduced the mission, the development and research projects to the scholars, and also demonstrated specific operations and functions of the Smart Learning Partner (SLP) and the Online and Offline Teaching Services (OOTS). Information Management Prof. Hossain from HKU highly recognized the accomplishments of AICFE. He thought that the Center’s system is fascinating, reducing educational gap between different regions and improving the quality of teachers. Prof. Hossain and Dr. Feng also mentioned that the SLP and the OOTS accumulated data can be fully used by researchers, establish data analysis frameworks and predictive models. Prof. Yu, especially, demonstrated the theoretical framework and functions of the Learning Cell platform, which triggered great interest of Dr. Feng who believed that the contribution of learners in cooperative learning can be studied from multiple perspectives.
From 10 am to 12 noon, Prof. Hossain and Dr. Feng gave a lecture entitled “Network Science in Disaster and Public Health Preparedness”. The lecture focused on complex networks, complex social network models, using the Australian Black Saturday firestorm incident as an example to show how social science theory can be used to guide real social relationships. Network science helps us to analyze the underlying structure, build a dynamic network that simulates real-world disasters, use network data to detect the effectiveness of disaster management, monitor public awareness, realize early understanding of disasters and improve the efficiency of response systems. the large amount of data can support large-scale network research on disasters at the local and global levels.
Prof. Liaquat Hossain in the speech
Dr. Shihui Feng lectured on the research based on Weibo data
Attendees: Song Jiachen, Associate Professor Minhong Wang, Prof. Hossain, Prof. Shengquan Yu, Dr. Shihui Feng, and Haijing Jiang (from left to right)
At the end of the meeting, scholars from the HKU expressed their appreciation for the Center’s research and actively showed their intention to cooperate. In the social network, the researchers aim to discover important nodes through the exchange of information, finds patterns and provide direction for behavior prediction. In this regard, Professor Yu Shengquan, the executive director of the AICFE, said that the AICFE welcomed experts in data analysis to work together to contribute to smart education.
