CU Coding Limited, a spin-off with members from the Department of Information Engineering, won a golden award for exhibiting its 5G nEdge technology at the 1st Greater Bay Area 5G Application and Innovation Challenge 2020. By leveraging 5G multiaccess edge computing along with network coding, nEdge alleviates security and privacy concerns of data, transferred through communication networks, stored in (untrusted) clouds. Moreover, nEdge also enables low-latency wireless communications and local content distribution in smart cities and smart factories.

The competition was jointly organized by the China Mobile Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area 5G Industry Alliance, the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, and the Science Park. Out of the 55 startups from Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao that participated in the competition, only 10 teams made it to the final stage. CU Coding was eventually declared the winner of the overall competition by a professional selection committee of experts. The committee scored the startups on innovation, creativity, function, efficiency, quality, market potential, and the social impact of their technologies.

The core members of CU Coding Limited are closely related to the deparment. The founders included Prof. Soung Liew, Prof. Raymond Yeung (both from Department of Information Engineering), Prof. Patrick Lee (IE Adjunct Professor and faculty from Department of Computer Science and Engineering) and Mr. Aldous Ng (IE alumnus in 1993).