HONG KONG, Jun 3, 2026 - (ACN Newswire) - The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Suzhou Calmcar Electronics Technology Co., Limited (CalmCar) yesterday officially signed a strategic agreement to jointly establish the Physical AI Innovation Center. The Center is dedicated to advancing full-stack physical AI technologies, addressing fundamental bottlenecks in current AI, including an insufficient understanding of the laws of the physical world, limited reasoning capabilities, and a lack of reliable support for action and decision-making.The Center will build a new-generation physical AI technology foundation capable of understanding, predicting, reasoning, and decision-making, supporting strategic industries such as autonomous driving, robotics, and smart manufacturing, while helping position Hong Kong as a key strategic hub for national physical AI innovation.
Multidimensional Research Directions: Full-Stack Layout from Chips to Applications
The Center will pursue research covering chips and systems, foundational models and data, privacy protection and safety governance, as well as core application scenarios. By exploring and leveraging world models to build high-fidelity strategy validation and interactive reasoning capabilities, the Center aims to train AI in virtual environments before transferring capabilities to the real world-significantly improving AI‘s generalizability, interpretability, and reliability in complex and open environments, and building a long-term technical foundation for a wide range of intelligent applications.
The Center’s ambition is to become a global strategic hub for physical AI innovation, leading the development of industry benchmarks and open-source platforms, and cultivating internationally competitive talent in physical AI.
Based in Hong Kong, Serving the National “AI+” Strategy
The Center will actively serve the national “AI+” strategy, positioning itself with Hong Kong as its base, the Greater Bay Area as its hinterland, and the world as its stage. It strives to become a strategic highland for physical AI research in the Asia-Pacific region and an international hub for collaboration. The Center will establish end-to-end capabilities from fundamental research to industrial deployment, providing unified technical standards and common tools for the industry. Leveraging Hong Kong’s global connectivity and the Greater Bay Area’s comprehensive industrial supply chain, the Center will accelerate technology transfer and build a world-leading research and innovation center for physical intelligence.
World-Class Academic Leadership
The Center is led by Prof. GUO Song – Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences (EU), IEEE Fellow, and Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST – who serves as its director. Prof. Guo has long been engaged in distributed computing, edge AI, and multi-modal foundation models, dedicated to solving the challenges of generalization and reliability of AI in real-world physical environments.
He is a recipient of the IEEE Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, one of the highest honors in computer engineering, and is widely recognized as an international leader in the field. He also leads the Pervasive Intelligence Laboratory (PeiLAB), which has been based in Hong Kong for a decade and has produced substantial original achievements in physical world modeling
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