Lin Hong

Lin Hong

Research Assistant Professor

Biography

I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Robotic Engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), under the supervision of Prof. Xin Wang in 2024. From 2023 to 2024, I had joint training at the Chair of Robotics, AI, and Real-Time Systems at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, working under the guidance of Chair Professor Alois Knoll. From 2025-2026, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute (CKSRI) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, HKUST, collaborating with Chair Professor Fumin Zhang. I received National Scholarships for Graduate Students in 2020 and 2023 and won the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2025).

My research interests are centered on marine robotics, robotic vision, underwater multimodal perception, and sensorimotor policy learning. Welcome to contact me for academic collaboration in the field of marine robotics at eelinhong@ust.hk.

News

  • 09/26 👏 I was appointed as Research Assistant Professor in the Department of ECE at the HKUST.
  • 07/26 👏 It was an honor to serve as a Publication Chair at WUWNet 2026.
  • 07/26 👏 It was an honor to serve as a Session Chair at ICIRA 2026.
  • 04/26 👏 One paper was accepted by IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.
  • 03/26 👏 One paper was accepted by OCEANS 2026 as an oral paper. I will present it in Sanya.
  • 03/26 👏 One paper was accepted by ICRA 2026.
  • 02/26 👏 One paper was accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
  • 10/25 👏 One paper was accepted by Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.
  • 08/25 👏 One paper was accepted by ICIRA 2025, it also won the Best Paper Award 🏆.
  • 07/25 👏 One paper was accepted by Ocean Engineering.

Publications

You can also find my full peer-review papers on my Google Scholar profile.

Invited Talks

  • 08.09.2023 “USOD10K: a new benchmark dataset for underwater salient object detection” in College of Ocean Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology..
  • 02.01.2024 “Advancing Visual Perception and Control of Underwater Robots for Efficient Underwater Inspections” in Chair of ITR, Technical University of Munich.

Student Supervision

  • 2025 Bozkurt Mürüvvet, Master Student, TUM. Research topic: Exploring Mixed Gaussian Model for Improved Underwater Instance Segmentation.
  • 2024 Moke Guo, Master Student, TUM. Research topic: Autonomous UAV Trajectory Tracking using Reinforcement Learning.
  • 2024 Qun Guo, Master Student, TUM. Research topic: Safety-Critical Control with Saliency Detection for Mobile Robots in Dynamic Multi-Obstacle Environments.

Services

Professional Contributions

  1. Session Chair for "Intelligent Perception and Control Technologies for Marine Robotic Systems", The 18th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA), Okayama, Japan, 2025.
  2. Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Ocean Engineering, ICRA, IROS, ICIRA, and CASE.

Memberships

  • Member, IEEE (2025–present)
  • Member, Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) (2023–2024)

Awards

  • 2025 Best Paper Award, The 18th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2025).
  • 2024 Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award at Harbin Institute of Technology.
  • 2023 National Scholarship for Graduate Students.
  • 2022 Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award at Harbin Institute of Technology.
  • 2021 Outstanding Student Cadre Award at Harbin Institute of Technology.
  • 2020 National Scholarship for Graduate Students.