President GONG Ke Visited the University of Kent

Supported by British Royal Academy of Engineering as its “Distinguished Visitor”, Prof. GONG Ke, President of Tianjin University, visited the University of Kent from Feb 1-3.

Prof. GONG was first welcomed by the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Julia Goodfellow, and Pro Vice Chancellor for International Affairs, Professor Alex Hughes, as well as Mr. Stephen Wallis, Associated Director of International Office. Both parties had expressed the satisfaction to the existing collaboration, especially the 3+1 undergraduate program, and strong wish to expand the cooperation fields between the two universities, especially to set up joint research in order to support joint doctorate program.

On Feb.2, Prof. GONG gave an academic seminar in the School of Engineering, titled “Research on multi-antenna systems for MIMO applications in mobile terminals”, in which he briefed the audience the novel design of the fundamental antenna in small size and with wide working bandwidth, and the techniques of decoupling for compact configuration and multiple antennas in mobile terminal. Then he talked about techniques of reconfiguration of antennas to build adaptive antenna system as well as the measurements made about the handholding effects on the antenna performance. This seminar was moderated by Professor Sarah Spurgeon, Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering and Head of the School of Engineering. Whilst the topic of the seminar dealt with the recent progress of key technologies for broadband wireless communication related to MIMO application, it attracted many students and teachers.

During his stay in Canterbury, Prof. GONG made a plenty academic visits. Firstly, he visited Laboratory of Measurements, Control and Embedded System, where he met Professor Yong Yan, guest professor of Tianjin University, and Dr. Gary Lu. Both of them showed common interests to enhance the given collaboration with the relevant group in TU to apply “international collaboration laboratory” to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology. Then, GONG visited Lab of Broadband and Wireless Communications, where Dr. John Batchelor briefed him the works on Frequency Selective Surface and antennas for wearable devices. In the Lab for Digital Media, Dr. Les Walczowski represented the intensive master course for digital moving picture design, and demonstrated their work on motion acquisition and virtual reality. In the Lab of Image and Information Engineering, Professor Mike Fairhurst summarized the works on pattern recognition and showed great interests to cooperate with Chinese counterpart. In the Lab of Broadband and Wireless Communications, Dr. Nathan Gomes, demonstrated the works on radio over fiber for distributed antenna system and varies research on photonics. And, Prof. GONG had in-depth discussion with Prof. J Wang about the work of communication group led by him and listened to the presentations by graduate students of the group.

During his stay at the University of Kent, Prof. GONG also made a “meet together” with Chinese students, including 5 from Tianjin University, and had a good conversation with them