Organisation profile

The School of Communication (Website: https://comd.hkbu.edu.hk/research/) is home to some 35 research faculty and 50 PhD students exploring a wide range of interests in communication and media studies. Our scholars’ research metrics place the School among the top 10 in Asia and top 100 in the world for Communication and Media Studies, according to the QS World University Rankings 2020. It has a critical mass of researchers in health communication, data and algorithmic journalism, and Sinophone cinema studies. Faculty are also advancing knowledge in a wide range of other specialisations, including political communication and activism; global media and culture; organisational leadership communication; branding communication; gender and media; and storytelling, stardom and performance studies. The School adopts a plurality of approaches to scholarly excellence and prizes transdisciplinarity. Its three academic units — the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Interactive Media and the Department of Journalism — include researchers working within social science paradigms as well as the arts and humanities, applying methods ranging from computational network analysis and large-scale surveys to textual analysis and cultural and political critique.

In support of the University’s six interdisciplinary research laboratories, the AI and Media Research Lab (Email: ny1724@hkbu.edu.hk, Website: https://www.comm.hkbu.edu.hk/aimr/eng/about.html) in the School of Communication is committed to creating a Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Initiative, with a particular focus on its application to media and communication. As part of the initiative, the AI and Media Research Lab serves as a hub for relevant research projects and topics, ranging from machine learning and textual analytics to online experiments and natural language processing. The Lab has been actively engaged in a series of research projects as well as teaching-related activities. Operating under the Lab, HKBU FactCheck Service (Phone: 3411-8159, Email: comm_fcs@hkbu.edu.hk, Website: https://comd.hkbu.edu.hk/factcheckservice/) is dedicated to conducting empirical research on misinformation and fact-checking in social media. The Service applies survey, experimental, computational, and mixed-methods research to the study of “fake news” in Hong Kong.