Inventing Humanistic Futures
CineSim and the New Languages of Cinema CineSim
Cinema has always taught us to see: to attend to light, movement, space, gesture, and emotion. At Lingnan, this art of seeing is being renewed for a changing technological age. Developed by Professor Tobby Kan and the Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries, CineSim—the world’s first cinematography simulation software—opens new possibilities for learning, experimentation, and creative practice.
Recognised as the sole Hong Kong recipient of the Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year award at the Times Higher Education Awards Asia 2026—selected from more than 500 entries—and honoured at major invention exhibitions in Geneva and Asia, CineSim affirms Lingnan’s conviction that technological innovation matters most when it extends human imagination.
The Quantitative Humanities China Lab
What happens when classical poetry, modern literature, cognitive science, and language models are brought into the same field of inquiry? The emerging Quantitative Humanities China Lab uses computational and cognitive methods to rethink how Chinese literature may be studied—and how a new generation may be trained in digital humanities research.
Its work includes ‘Vector Poetics,’ which uses language models to analyse parallelism in classical Chinese poetry, and ‘Cognitive Stylometry,’ which applies GPT perplexity to the study of stylistic defamiliarisation in modern literature. The international symposium “Neurons and Texts: New Frontiers of Chinese Humanities” brought scholars from Princeton, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and other universities to Lingnan to explore this changing intellectual landscape.
Human-Centred AI in Language Education
Across Lingnan’s language classrooms, artificial intelligence is integrated to enhance feedback, reflection, and learner agency while reinforcing human teaching.
In the Chinese Language Education and Assessment Centre (CLEAC), AI is embedded into core Chinese courses to support reading comprehension and Putonghua oral training, generating feedback from over 1,200 student responses annually. Building on its established strategic partnerships with iFLYTEK and national language authorities, CLEAC collaborated with the School of Data Science to advance the research and development of AI-powered language training. Complementing these efforts, the Centre for English and Additional Languages (CEAL) has deployed AI pilots to provide corrective written feedback on over 1,400 handwritten student responses, alongside initiatives in AI-supported diagnostics, robot-assisted speaking, and game-based vocabulary development.
Matched by research distinction—including Dr Zhang Ruofei’s 2025 Dorothy Chun Award for Best Journal Article in Language Learning & Technology—these initiatives make Lingnan a testing ground for responsible educational innovation.
Digital English Studies for an AI Age
Language is one of humanity’s deepest inheritances. It is how we remember, persuade, console, resist, invent, and imagine worlds beyond the one we know.
Master of Arts in Digital English Studies, Hong Kong’s first of its kind, was launched by Lingnan in 2025, places literary and linguistic study in active conversation with artificial intelligence, digital communication, and contemporary cultural life. It asks what happens to reading, writing, authorship, attention, and interpretation when machines increasingly participate in our communicative worlds.
This is a humanities education for the present: critically alert, technologically literate, and steadfast in its commitment to the irreducible richness of language and human thought.
The Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre
The most consequential questions of our age cannot be answered by technology alone. They demand ethical judgement, philosophical clarity, and the courage to think beyond immediate interests.
Established in 2022 as Asia's first research centre devoted to global catastrophic risks and the ethics of emerging technologies, the Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre studies the ethics of artificial intelligence, existential risk, and our obligations to future generations. Its members publish in leading international journals, and their work on the risk of suffering in future AI systems has informed the policy report Taking AI Welfare Seriously, discussed in the Financial Times and Nature. The Centre's free bilingual online course, Ethics and Global Catastrophic Risks, reached more than 23,000 users within six months of its launch and was used in university teaching in Singapore and Shanghai.
At Lingnan, philosophy is not removed from the world. It is a disciplined practice of asking how we ought to live, what we owe to one another, and what responsibilities we bear towards generations yet to come.