The Birth of the College of Computing (2024) – CityU’s College Restructuring and Organisational Choice in the AI Era

This article belongs to CityU Wild History module 10 and sits alongside naming-and-academic-colleges.md and residence-and-no-college-system.md. For an overview of the naming of CityU’s seven academic Colleges, see the former; this piece is dedicated to the genesis of CityU’s youngest College – the College of Computing.

During one week in mid‑August 2024, CityU did two things in quick succession: first it signed a cooperation framework with the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance, and then, a week later, it announced the new College of Computing. That the two events followed each other so closely was no coincidence – they were two moves in the same game. What this article unpacks is precisely how that game was played out.

One‑sentence summary: The College of Computing of City University of Hong Kong (CityU) came into formal operation on 1 September 2024^※. It brings together three academic units – the Department of Computer Science, the School of Data Science (founded in 2018, Hong Kong’s first independent data‑science school) and the Department of Biostatistics (founded in 2021) – in a strategic, College‑level restructuring designed to meet the demand for cross‑disciplinary talent in the AI era.

# Why did CityU need a dedicated “College of Computing” in 2024?

Before 2024, CityU’s three computing‑related academic units were scattered across two faculties: the Department of Computer Science sat within the College of Engineering; the School of Data Science (SDSC) existed as an independent School; and the Department of Biostatistics belonged to the College of Science. Each had its own affiliation, and lateral collaboration was constrained by those institutional boundaries.

In the official press release of 19 August 2024, CityU President Professor Freddy Boey spelled out the logic behind the restructuring: 「跨學科領域的融合在教育領域日益重要。計算學院的成立……將匯聚跨學科人才，是一個具有前瞻性的戰略舉措，旨在培養下一代科技創新者、學者和先驅者，使他們在數據驅動、AI賦能的新時代大展宏圖。」 (“Interdisciplinary integration is increasingly important in education. The establishment of the College of Computing … will bring together cross‑disciplinary talent. It is a forward‑looking strategic move designed to nurture the next generation of technology innovators, scholars and pioneers, enabling them to excel in a new era that is data‑driven and AI‑empowered.” – CityU news release, 19 Aug 2024^※) This official characterisation reveals the core judgement: the boundaries between computer science, data science and statistics had already become blurred in the AI era, and diffused management was no longer adequate for the increasingly interdisciplinary direction of research and teaching. Merging the three into an independent College was both a resource consolidation and a signal to the outside world: CityU now regards computing as a strategic pillar on a par with business and engineering.

# What is the background of the three precursor units?

The College of Computing amalgamated three existing units, each with a different institutional history. The table below outlines their precursors, host faculties and founding years.

The School of Data Science (SDSC, 2018) is the most pioneering of the three precursors. Founded in July 2018^※, it was the first stand‑alone school in Hong Kong – and indeed in the region – to be named after data science, conceived as a strategic response to the “data‑driven economy” at a time when no comparable independent school existed in any Hong Kong university. Over six years SDSC developed a suite of undergraduate (Data Science, Data and Systems Engineering) and postgraduate programmes. When it was merged into the College of Computing in 2024 as the Department of Data Science, it was demoted to departmental level, but its curricula and student registration arrangements were kept unchanged^※.

The Department of Biostatistics (2021) was Hong Kong’s first department of biostatistics^※ (the only one in the city, founded on 1 July 2021). Originally under the College of Science, it focused on health data science and cross‑disciplinary medical statistics. Its 2024 move to the College of Computing was driven by the university’s judgement that the methodological core of biostatistics and bioinformatics – statistical modelling and computation – is highly isomorphic with computer science and data science, and that AI‑driven life‑science research made closer collaboration among the three areas increasingly urgent.

# What is the departmental structure and what are the undergraduate programmes of the College of Computing?

The College of Computing now has three departments offering a total of five undergraduate programmes (for the 2024/25 intake); the Department of Biostatistics currently offers no undergraduate courses^※.

Among these, the “AI, Computing and Breakthrough Programme (1070)” is the College’s flagship new direction, embodying its emphasis on nurturing applied AI talent. The College’s founding Dean is Professor Jianping Wang^※, who previously served as CityU’s Associate Provost (Academic Planning and Quality Assurance). Her research interests include autonomous driving, edge computing and optical networks, making her a computer scientist who spans both systems and applications.

# How does the College’s establishment connect with Hong Kong’s innovation‑and‑technology policy backdrop?

The College of Computing was no isolated internal restructuring; its timing aligns strongly with Hong Kong’s policy environment. Since the 2022 Policy Address, the HKSAR Government has repeatedly stressed developing Hong Kong into an “international innovation and technology centre”, with AI and data‑science talent identified as a key priority. CityU’s moves were equally intensive during the same period: on 13 August 2024^※, barely a week before the College’s official launch, CityU signed a strategic cooperation framework with the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA) to deepen AI industry‑academia linkages through “multi‑level collaboration”. In October 2024, CityU went on to establish the Hong Kong Institute of AI Science (HKAI‑Sci)^※, working with academic and industry partners to advance AI‑driven scientific research – a layout for which the College of Computing serves as the core anchor.

In international comparison, the idea of merging computer science, data science and statistics into a College‑level entity is not CityU’s invention – the University of California, Berkeley created its College of Computing, Data Science & Society in 2022, and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science has been running for decades. Within the Hong Kong university sector, however, the move has a trailblazing significance: raising statistics, data and computing en masse to the level of a “College” that stands alongside business and engineering directly reflects the senior management’s re‑assessment of the relative weight of different disciplines in the AI era.

# Are existing courses and student arrangements affected by the restructuring?

When announcing the restructuring, CityU explicitly committed that all undergraduate and postgraduate programme contents and requirements would remain unchanged^※, and that current students would not be affected – those originally enrolled in SDSC, the Department of Computer Science, or the Department of Biostatistics will have their graduation certificates issued by the College of Computing, but their study plans and course requirements will not need to be adjusted. This “curricula unchanged, structure reorganised” approach is a transitional arrangement commonly seen in large‑scale faculty mergers, and also a necessary gesture to maintain the trust of prospective students.

For applicants, the substantive significance of the College of Computing is this: the university is bringing the relevant programmes in computer science and data science under unified College‑level management, so that research resources, laboratory allocation and curricular cross‑fertilisation will receive systematic support at the College level, rather than relying on cross‑faculty coordination. This, to some extent, reduces the administrative barriers to cross‑departmental elective courses and joint research.

# Navigation: relationships with other modules

• 01‑academics module (programme archives) → Details of the College of Computing’s undergraduate/postgraduate programme structures, credit requirements and admissions standards.
• 04‑research module (research) → Specific research centres within the College’s departments and details of HKAI‑Sci.
• 10‑colleges module · naming-and-academic-colleges.md → Analysis of the naming of CityU’s seven “Colleges” and a full overview of the university’s academic structure.
• 10‑colleges module · residence-and-no-college-system.md → Overview of CityU’s lack of a collegiate system and its residential hall framework.