Message from CIO and University Librarian

Warm welcome to all our new 5,000+ students, a record high in this year, and the return of our new existing students and staff from an enjoyable summer.

During the summer break, I was invited by Times Higher Education to speak in its conference Digital Universities Asia 2024 held in Bali, Indonesia on a panel titled “How to build a cybersecure campus for everyone”. It was attended full house that bombarded much interesting discussions. In the digital era, cybersecurity has been elevated into an essential subject that everyone must attend and acquire the knowledge. In recent years, universities have become the target for cyber-attacks. At Lingnan, we also recorded some attempts to attack our networks or compromise our accounts in past few months. Fortunately, all these attempts failed because we have installed multiple protection mechanisms to build up a secure network. The continuous monitoring by our staff should also be credited. To further enhance the security of the network environment, we have implemented in this summer a Web Application Firewall to protect our university websites and online applications.

However, technology alone is not enough; the human factor is a critical vulnerability in cybersecurity. Many of the attacks can be avoided if you are more aware of the tricks of the attackers. I therefore call upon your attention to visit our cybersecurity training platform to learn all the practical tips and knowledge to become smarter in avoiding the traps of the cyber attackers.

The Conference was also marked by the keynote speech of the President S Joe Qin, who highlighted the tremendous transformation generative AI such as ChatGPT could bring to the liberal arts education and research in the digital age. ITSC aligns its development fully with this strategic move of the University. We continuously enhance the functionalities and features of our ChatGPT and are building our first High Performance Computing Centre to support the new academic programs on AI, big data, machine learning offered by the School of Data Science, School of Interdisciplinary Studies and other academic departments. We also develop new applications and uplift the legacy ones to accelerate the pace of digital transformation of different academic and administrative units. 

Hope you will enjoy reading the various developments and achievements of ITSC in the past few months and we will continue to share our remarkable progress in the future.