College of Computing (new in 2024) and the College of Science — reorganising disciplines for the AI era

Module: 01 Academics · Sub-file: College of Computing + College of Science At a moment when artificial intelligence has become the focus of competition among universities worldwide, City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) responded with a decisive organisational move: on 1 September 2024 it established the College of Computing^※, gathering under one roof the computing-related disciplines that had previously been scattered across the College of Engineering, the College of Science and the independent School of Data Science. The College of Science, meanwhile, has slimmed down after the departure of two of its departments — biostatistics and biomedical sciences — and now concentrates on the three core disciplines of chemistry, mathematics and physics. This article sets out the background to the restructuring and the current state of both colleges; every fact is attributed to a public source. For an overview of all colleges, see colleges-and-schools.md.

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# 1. The founding: an organisational restructuring for the AI era

According to public reports^※, CityUHK announced the establishment of the College of Computing as a strategic initiative to advance interdisciplinary research and nurture innovation. The College officially opened on 1 September 2024^※.

In many universities, computer science, data science and statistics tend to live in different faculties — computer science under an engineering school, statistics under a science school. CityUHK's move to consolidate these computing-related disciplines into a single new college is an organisational choice best described as "clenching scattered computing strengths into a fist": the logic behind it is to concentrate resources and break down disciplinary walls in response to the wave of AI and data science.

The College's founding dean is Wang Jianping, Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science. She received her bachelor's (1996) and master's (1999) degrees in computer science from Nankai University^※, and her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2003. She subsequently served as assistant professor at Georgia Southern University and the University of Mississippi before joining CityUHK, where she has also held the post of Associate Provost (Strategic Planning and Quality Assurance). Her expertise spans autonomous driving, cloud computing, network coding and optical networks, and she is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association)^※. She served as Dean-designate and headed the task force during the College's planning phase, formally assuming the deanship in September 2024. The College's creation was no mere rebranding: it represents a genuine institutional transformation, planned and staffed under the leadership of a female scholar with deep roots in systems and networking.

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# 2. Disciplinary scope: the "confluence" of computing, data and statistics

According to CityUHK's 2024 announcement^※, the College of Computing integrates three departments:

The College is positioned as a centre of excellence for integrated research in computer science, data science and statistics, advancing progress across a range of computing-related fields. Concretely, these cover computer science, data science, biostatistics and bioinformatics, with artificial intelligence (AI) as the strong unifying focus across all of them.

This disciplinary mix is significant: it spans traditional computer science while also bringing statistics and bioinformatics under the same roof — which is precisely the shape of contemporary AI and data science in practice (machine learning is at bottom a fusion of statistics and computation, and bioinformatics is the application of computational methods to the life sciences). In other words, the College's disciplinary map is itself one answer to the question "how should computing education and research be organised in the AI era?"

# Computer science / data science rankings

The undergraduate curriculum of CityUHK's Computer Science department offers several concentration streams^※, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data science, multimedia computing, software engineering and project management.

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# 3. Data science: from independent school to a department of the College of Computing

CityUHK's School of Data Science was once the region's first independent school focused on data science and its applications^※, established in 2018. On 1 September 2024, CityUHK established the College of Computing, and the former School of Data Science was restructured into the College's Department of Data Science.

The data science stream offers BSc Data Science and BSc Data and Systems Engineering^※ undergraduate majors, covering data science, machine learning, data mining and big-data analytics, alongside taught-master's and research degrees.

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# 4. The Department of Biostatistics: the most "obscure" yet most boundary-crossing of the three

Of the three departments folded into the College of Computing, computer science and data science are natural bedfellows. The Department of Biostatistics may look like the odd one out, but it is in fact the crucial link connecting statistical methodology with the life sciences and public-health data — for AI models to be deployed in high-stakes fields like medicine and genomics, they depend on the rigorous inferential framework this discipline provides.

According to the Department's public research page^※, its research is organised into six clusters:

The Department offers MSc, MPhil and PhD^※ degrees, training researchers with both statistical-methodology depth and biomedical application skills. Placing this department in the College of Computing rather than leaving it in the College of Science or moving it into a medical faculty reflects, in a sense, CityUHK's conviction that "statistics is the underlying language of AI" — the credibility and interpretability of machine-learning models ultimately rest on the rigour of statistical inference, and that is precisely what sets biostatistics apart from a purely algorithm-oriented computer science department.

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# 5. Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science: the second piece of the AI puzzle beyond the College of Computing

The College of Computing is not the whole of CityUHK's AI strategy. On 21 October 2024^※ — six weeks after the College opened, and coinciding with CityUHK's 30th anniversary — the University joined with academic and industry partners to establish the Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science (HKAI-Sci), positioning it as an interdisciplinary platform for "AI-driven scientific research" across biology, chemistry, materials science and related fields, championing both "AI as a Science" and "AI for Science".

The founding Dean-designate is Prof. Ma Wei-Ying. The Institute's partners include Berxel Photonics, the Hong Kong Innovation Science and Technology Centre of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank International Holdings, Surrich International and Trio AI, among other academic and industrial organisations.

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# 6. Mission: serving Hong Kong's positioning as an innovation and technology hub

According to public reports^※, the founding of the College of Computing is seen as an important step in CityUHK's mission to help establish Hong Kong as a global innovation and technology hub. The College's objectives include:

• fostering cutting-edge collaborative research;
• developing advanced analytical tools;
• creating AI-driven solutions to address complex global challenges.

This mission aligns closely with the Hong Kong SAR government's recent push for innovation and technology, and with CityUHK's own tradition of emphasising application and translation (see 04-research/patents-and-hk-tech-300.md). The College of Computing can be understood as the institutional vehicle through which CityUHK has organised and formalised its "AI strategy".

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# 7. Relationship to CityUHK's broader institutional landscape

• A further expression of disciplinary focus. CityUHK has long pursued a strategy of "small but select, concentrating on key disciplines"; after materials science, betting on AI and data science through the College of Computing is the continuation of that strategy into a new technology cycle.
• Interdisciplinarity made real at the institutional level. Bringing computer science, data science, statistics and bioinformatics together in one college turns "interdisciplinary" from slogan into organisational structure — in the same lineage as the School of Creative Media's "art + computing" crossover logic (see 01-academics/creative-media.md).
• Echoes with the Dongguan campus. Computer science and technology was among the first majors offered at CityUHK (Dongguan) (see 09-international/cityu-dongguan-campus.md), allowing a "R&D-to-extension" linkage with the main campus's College of Computing.

A note on scope: the College of Computing is a new body established only in 2024; the precise scope of its departmental consolidation and its relationship to the former Department of Computer Science and School of Data Science may adjust as integration proceeds. The authoritative reference is the latest statement on CityUHK's official structure pages (the College of Computing website^※). This archive records only the establishment facts and positioning that have been publicly announced.

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# 8. The five-way competition: where the College of Computing sits in Hong Kong's higher-education map

Among Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities, five — HKU, HKUST, CUHK, CityUHK and PolyU — all offer computer science or artificial intelligence programmes, and their rankings and positioning are frequently compared side by side. Drawing on multiple 2025–2026 rankings and specialist reports, each institution has a different emphasis:

Seen on this map, the College of Computing's differentiation does not lie in absolute positions on single-subject rankings — where it trails HKUST and CUHK on QS/THE — but in its institutional architecture of "computer science + data science + statistics" as a trinity, an integration that is fairly distinctive among the five: most institutions still keep statistics and biostatistics in science faculties or as standalone units, whereas CityUHK has placed them in the same college as computer science, using organisational structure to mirror the reality that "AI in practice requires algorithms, data and statistical inference to work together". Whether this path pays off remains to be seen, but at the level of disciplinary organisation it at least constitutes an experiment distinct from the "computer science still resident in an engineering/science faculty" model of the other four.

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# 9. The College of Science: three departments after the restructuring

With biostatistics moved to the College of Computing and biomedical sciences moved to the College of Biomedical Sciences, the College of Science now concentrates on the three foundational disciplines of chemistry, mathematics and physics.

Currently 3 departments^※. The Department of Biomedical Sciences was merged into the College of Biomedical Sciences (January 2025), and the Department of Biostatistics was merged into the College of Computing (September 2024) — where older materials still list them under the College of Science, the current structure prevails.

# Research strengths and rankings

The College of Science ranks among the top in Hong Kong in several international subject rankings (positions below are as cited by the College/public rankings; the latest publication of each organisation prevails):

Materials science and engineering, though administered under the College of Engineering, is heavily intertwined with the sciences (condensed-matter physics, chemistry) and is CityUHK's most iconic discipline — QS 2026, 39th globally, 1st in Hong Kong^※ (see college-of-engineering-departments.md). The College of Science offers BSc majors in chemistry, mathematics, physics and related interdisciplinary directions, as well as MPhil and PhD research degrees.

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# 10. Summary

• CityUHK's College of Computing was established on 1 September 2024^※, integrating computer science, data science and statistics — including biostatistics and bioinformatics — with AI as a strong focus; it is a strategic initiative responding to the AI era and serving Hong Kong's innovation-and-technology-hub positioning, with Chair Professor Wang Jianping as founding dean.
• The Department of Data Science was restructured from the School of Data Science, founded as a separate school in 2018, and is now one department within the College of Computing; the Department of Biostatistics, with its six research directions including Bayesian statistics, survival analysis and statistical genetics, provides the methodological foundation of statistical inference for the College.
• Alongside the College of Computing, CityUHK concurrently established the Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science (HKAI-Sci), pursuing a cross-college collaborative line of "AI serving other natural-science disciplines" — together the two constitute a twin-track arrangement of teaching apparatus and research platform.
• Horizontally, CityUHK's computing disciplines trail HKU, HKUST and CUHK on single-subject QS/THE rankings, but its trinity of "computer science + data science + statistics" is comparatively distinctive among the five universities.
• After the restructuring, the College of Science concentrates on chemistry, mathematics and physics, each ranked first in Hong Kong, with 10 scholars named Highly Cited Researchers 2023.
• The restructuring of both colleges echoes CityUHK's broader patterns of "disciplinary focus" and "institutionalised interdisciplinarity", as well as the computing programmes at the Dongguan campus.

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