About H2O

The Hong Kong-Helsinki Oasis for Innovation and Technology (H2O Centre) paves the way for never-before-seen opportunities for innovation and cultural exposure across the two regions for students and professionals alike. Through the exchange of ideas among a diverse group of people, H2O facilitates the establishment of technology-related government policies, develops the spirit of innovation in Hong Kong and acts as a hub for entrepreneurship. H2O will focus on AI for smart and sustainable cities by leveraging two unique strengths of Finland - AI and mobile communications.

Major Goals of H2O

H20 aims to achieve:

• Diffusion of key technology and talent across the two regions, to enhance research quality and diversification of expertise and introduce Hong Kong’s innovation to the world.
• Make Hong Kong a leader in the field of AI-augmented communications in the Greater Bay Area, and a major player in the One Belt One Road initiative, and unleash Hong Kong’s potential as a global leader in AI technologies by expanding existing research efforts and creating new ones.
• Spur and enable continued development of the rapidly globalizing East-Asia economic region by collaboration with long-standing R&D institutions.
• Make Hong Kong the world’s first fully integrated Smart-Augmented Reality (AR) city as a demonstration of the potential of 5G and AI-based applications, and prepare Hong Kong to be at the forefront of future generations of mobile networks, including 6G and beyond.

Targeted Outcomes

• Attract local and international talents. H2O will give great visibility internationally thanks to its novel approach to research, as well as the ambitious projects showcasing Hong Kong’s excellence in high technologies. In Hong Kong, we also hope to leverage H2O to attract more young talents to science through the organizations of events in partnership with schools and societies.

• Develop entrepreneurship. By bringing together the general public, investors, and entrepreneurs, we intend to spark the creation of new innovations and develop the entrepreneurial culture throughout Hong Kong society.

• Make HK the showcase for 5G and AI-based applications. By making Hong Kong the world’s first fully integrated AR city, we aim at showcasing both the power of such technology in the near future, but also establish Hong Kong as a leader of innovation everywhere in the world, and more particularly in East Asia.

• Serve as the fastest gateway for Hong Kong innovation businesses and young entrepreneurs and engineers to develop denser economic and technological bonds with Europe.

Besides creating successful intelligence properties and high impact invents, H2O on the other hand also highly values academic openness and community obligation. To contribute to local and international developer communities and to help small companies for development, H2O would like to support open access and keep part of its software and research results open-sourced. We believe this is important to keep the developer ecosystem evolving. H2O also believes diversity brews creativity and we would like to maintain nationality diversity and gender balance in our research centre.

Our Vision

Within 10 years, we envision for Hong Kong to be fully integrated with AI-enabled AR technology, not only for the general public but also for use in industry and government applications. Making Hong Kong the first AR city will combine the massive amount of data generated around the city with strong artificial intelligence mechanisms to display relevant information to the users. We expect Hong Kong to become a major international hub for technology and innovation, and lead the way towards the next generations of artificial intelligence and communication technologies.

In a shorter timeframe—within 5 years—we aim at bringing together people through the opportunities enabled by 5G communication and its applications for Hong Kong and the world. We will also explore the possibilities offered by technologies behind AI and their applications beyond.