Message from Faculty of Arts

Dear colleagues and students,

We are pleased to invite you to an upcoming seminar, "Exploring AI-Supported Learning with Ark Junior", held on Tuesday, 1 September 2026. Please find the details below.

Abstract

Slides carry only fragments of a lecture. The rest is spoken: the worked explanation, the data behind a claim, the aside that makes a difficult point land. And much of it is never said at all, for want of time or because it slipped the instructor's mind.

Ark Junior, an AI platform developed by the HKU Shanghai Cross Innovation Lab, turns existing slides and readings into narrated interactive sessions. What students hear is not left to the AI alone: it is generated from the course materials and then curated by the instructor, who decides what is said, in what order, and with what emphasis. The AI annotates each slide as it explains, pacing itself to the difficulty of the concept, in a cloned version of the instructor's voice if desired. Students can interrupt at any point to ask questions.

Prof. Zheng Zhang will give a live demonstration of Ark Junior. Dr David Villena will then present its first use in a Faculty of Arts course, "AI and the Future of Humanity" (HKU Academy for the Talented, July 2026): how the materials were built, what the interaction data and post-course survey show, and where such tools earn their place in humanities teaching and where they do not.

About the Speakers

Prof. Zheng Zhang

Prof. Zheng Zhang is Founder and Chief Scientist of The HKU Shanghai Cross Innovation Lab (HKU SH X-Lab) and Professor in the School of Computing and Data Science at The University of Hong Kong. He was previously Senior Principal Scientist and Founding Director of the Amazon Web Services Shanghai AI Lab, and a Global Network Professor of Computer Science at NYU Shanghai. He has founded and advised several deep-learning platforms, including MXNet, MinPy, and DGL. In 2025, he released LLM4LLM, an open-source self-learning course exploring education in the AI era.

Dr David Villena

Dr David Villena is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at The University of Hong Kong. He teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the MA in Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society, and is a Research Affiliate at the HKU AI & Humanities Lab. His work focuses on the philosophy and ethics of AI, particularly how intelligent systems shape human judgment, perception, and influence in digital environments. He received the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award 2024-25 and is a Teaching Star @HKU.

Seminar Details

Title: Exploring AI-Supported Learning with Ark Junior

Subtitle: From Slides to Dialogue: Teaching with Ark Junior, an AI-Powered Classroom

Date: 1 September 2026 (Tuesday)

Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm (HKT)

Language: English

Venue: Arts Tech Lab (Room 4.35), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

For more details and to register, please visit:

https://www.atlab.hku.hk/september-1st-2026-tuesday-exploring-ai-supported-learning-with-ark-junior/

This event is hosted by the HKU Arts Tech Lab.

For enquiries, please contact atlask@hku.hk.

We look forward to your participation in this enriching learning experience!

Best regards,

Arts Tech Lab
Faculty of Arts