Rita Yi Man Li

Sustainable Real Estate Research Center / 

Department of Economics and Finance

Shue Yan University, Hong Kong China

Research Area: Housing big data, applied AI for construction safety and housing price analysis

Speech title: Can a chatbot enhance hazard awareness in the construction industry?

Abstract: Waiting for the update

Brief biography:

Graduated from HKU (global subject ranking 14 in QS), I now serve as an Associate Professor in Dept of Economics and Finance in Hong Kong Shue Yan University. I am the founder and director of Sustainable Real Estate Research Center. My major field of research interests lies in construction safety, sustainable building, housing economics, real estate economics and construction informatics. 

I act as a journal editorial board members for many journals (see call for papers in this website), an author of 9 books and over 200 articles over the past eight years. We now call for paper for our special issue ‘AI and smart cities’ implications on urban safety‘ Safety Science IF4.105 (with Georgios Boustras, editor in chief of Safety Science in 2021).

Over the years, I won many local and international awards. I act as a PI and co-I for many academic research grants, including 6 highly competitive grants from Research Grant Council, Public Policy Research Grant and other grants obtained from quasi public institutions and government departments (over 10 million). We have also invited 15 top professors for our IIDS seminar within one year’s time, including Prof John Macintyre, Pro Vice Chancellor of University of Sunderland, Chair Professor Michael Skibniewski (University of Maryland, former Associate Provost in University of Princeton), Distinguished Professor Demetri Terzopoulos (UCLA), Professor Thad Starner (Georgia Tech, team leader of Google Glass), Professor Simon Beecham (former Pro Vice-Chancellor in University of South Australia), Professor Michael Batty (UCL) and many other leading professors in AI and ubiquitous city related areas, see details in our project website.

I was the outstanding reviewer of Journal of Cleaner Production, a recipient of a Fellowship from the US to study the impact of law and culture on housing fittings in China which offered me a chance to present a paper to Nobel Prize Economist Prof Douglass North and received the top three presenter award among all the fellowship recipients. I was also a recipient of a grant issued by Ministry of Education jointly with a scholar from the People’s Republic of China, a visiting fellowship awardee from Australia and a finalist award for competition law research in the US, the best paper award for the paper titled “Mechanical and Physical Properties of Basalt Fiber High Strength High Titanium Heavy Slag Concrete”, Rajamangala University of Technology Rattanakosin International Conference “Innovative Technology and Creative Work toward Sustainable Development in 2021. I have also obtained software sponsored from AWS for cloud education and H2O.ai for Natural Language Processing and Explainable AI collaboration and initiate collaboration with Huawei in 2021.

I hold a few visiting positions in overseas university. I am currently an adjunct Professor of Economics at the Rattanakosin International College of Creative Entrepreneurship, Rajamangala University of Technology Rattanakosin in Thailand and an Adjunct Associate Professor in China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, Tianjin University in China. I also served as an Endeavour Research Fellow at the University of South Australia (with Professor Simon Beecham, Deputy Vice Chancellor), a visiting scholar at RMIT (with Distinguished Professor Helen Lingard) in Australia, University of Regina (with Chair Professor Christine Chan, AI research) and Feng Chia University in Taiwan. I also gave guest lecture for Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaysia) and Hochschule 21 (Germany). Besides, I previously served as a PhD thesis external examiner for University of Macau, University Putra Malaysia, and an external examiner for Open University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University. I am also invited by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to serve as a research grant reviewer.