Professor K. W. Chau is a currently Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Real Estate and Construction and Director of the Ronald Coase Centre for Property Rights Research at The University of Hong Kong. He is also Honorary President of the Chinese Research Institute of Construction Management (CRIOCM). His main areas of research include real estate finance and economics, real estate price index, construction economics and urban analysis. Most of his works are empirical studies with implications for policy makers and practitioners. He received the International Real Estate Society Achievement Award in 1999. He founded Asian Real Estate Society in 1996 and served as the first President (1996-7). He also served as President of the International Real Estate Society (2000-1). He was elected as President of the Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors (2009-10). and President of the Chinese Research Institute of Construction Management (2014-17).Professor Chau has many years of experience in real estate research and consultancy. He has done many consultancy works for private and public organizations. Professor Chau has also served and is serving on many government committees.Dr. Isabelle Chan is lecturer at the Department of Real Estate and Construction, University of Hong Kong, PRC. In the past few years, she has participated in more than 10 government-/university- /industry-funded research projects covering areas of occupational health and safety, sustainability, and innovation in construction. In line with these projects, she has over 50 international publications in books, journals and conferences. Isabelle is also the vice-chairman of the Institute of Safety and Health Practitioners in Hong Kong.Dr. Wilson Lu’s research interests mainly including Building Information Modelling (BIM), smart construction, big data in construction waste management, and international construction. He is the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Architecture (FoA), looking after research and knowledge exchange (KE) in the Faculty. Dr Lu is also steering the development of iLab, which is an urban big data hub under the umbrella of the HKUrbanLab, the research arm of the FoA at HKU. iLab facilitates multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary urban big data collection, storage, analysis, and presentation to inform all sorts of decision-making throughout the lifecycle of urban development. iLab also has its own unique research remit to integrate big data in pursuit of integrated modeling of smart urban development, combining smart community, smart infrastructure, smart construction, smart property and facilities management and Internet of Things (IoTs). His recent research projects fostered in iLab include how BIM can be used for construction cost management, smart construction, logistic and supply chain management, and facility maintenance. Prof. Chris Webster is Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, the University of Hong Kong, and leads the HKUrbanLab. He has degrees in urban planning, computer science, economics and economic geography and is a leading urban theorist and spatial economic modeller. He has published over 150 scholarly papers on the idea of spontaneous urban order and received over US$20M grants for research and teaching and learning projects. He was co-editor of Environment and Planning B for ten years. Books include Webster and Lai (2003) Property Rights, Planning and Markets, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar; Glasze, Webster and Frantz, (2006) Private Cities, London, Routledge; Wu, Webster, He and Liu, (2010) Urban Poverty in China, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; and Wu and Webster (Editors) Marginalisation in Urban China. London: Palgrave McMillan; and Sarkar, Webster and Gallacher (2014) Healthy Cities: Public Health Through Urban Planning. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Professor Webster has nine prize-winning academic papers on urban theory. He has many research interests on the go, including leading HKU’s Healthy High Density Cities research group. His current research agenda for this group is to establish systematic evidence for the relationship between urban configuration (planned and spontaneous) and individual health. To do this he has teamed up with the Oxford University based UKBiobank (N=500,000), the HKU LKS Faculty of Medicine’s Family cohort (N=40,000) and other national-scale epidemiology studies (N=500,000) to create large scale medical- built-environment platforms for healthy-city science. He also co-leads HKU’s One Belt One Road Observatory (OBORObs), which has the objective of modelling and predicting connectivity improvements in the Eurasian urban network and advising city governments on smart land policy to capture more of the land value uplift of OBOR infrastructure for the urban poor.
