A two-day workshop on the frontiers in systems and control organised by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was held at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) from 24 to 25 August. The workshop provided a platform for scholars to discuss the latest developments in the field of systems and control. The field covers a range of applications including guided missiles and rockets, robotics, smart cities and infrastructures, power grids, IOT (internet of things), driverless cars, healthcare, supply chains, and financial systems.

IAS Senior Fellow Professor Liu Chain-tsuan won the Outstanding Contribution Award by Progress in Natural Science: Materials International at the 2017 Annual Meeting of Chinese Materials Research Society (C MRS) and International Union of Materials Research Societies (IUMRS) held in Yinchuan, China.

City University of Hong Kong (CityU) will confer honorary doctoral degrees on Professor Serge Haroche, Dr Joseph Lee, GBS, OStJ, JP and Professor Wendelin Werner in recognition of their significant contributions to education and the well-being of society. The awards ceremony will be held in November 2017. Professor Serge Haroche, a distinguished scholar and a Nobel Laureate in Physics, will be conferred an Honorary Doctor of Science. Professor Haroche is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at CityU and Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France. His main research activities lie in quantum optics and quantum information science.

Professor Way Kuo, President of City University of Hong Kong and IAS Senior Fellow, was conferred the Asian Social Caring Leadership Award at the Nobel Laureate Series: Social Caring Pledge Scheme Award Presentation Ceremony on 5 June. He is a participating leader on the Social Caring Pledge Scheme.

There are only four APT laboratories in China but not a single one south of the Yangtze River. That means CityU’s APT Lab is pretty special for the study of nanostructures in advanced materials. And it is even more special because CityU’s APT technology produces data faster, cheaper and more efficiently than any other models. Professor C.T. Liu, IAS Senior Fellow and an expert in new materials, shared his insights on advanced materials.

Really, really small, but very, very strong: this sums up the very specific advanced material that scientists led by IAS Senior Fellow Professor Jian Lu at CityU have created.

IAS Senior Fellow Professor Robert O. Ritchie was named the 2017 winner of the Morris Cohen Award from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) for "seminal contributions to the mechanistic understanding of the fracture and fatigue of a broad range of engineering, bioinspired and biological materials". The award was presented at the TMS-AIME Annual Awards Ceremony during the 146th TMS Annual Meeting in San Diego on 1 March 2017.

IAS Senior Fellow Professor Herbert Gleiter was awarded the Medal of Friendship - Order of Merit by Jiangsu Provincial People’s Government of PRC. This order was awarded (for the first time to a citizen from abroad) for the foundation --- in 2011 --- and the successful start of the "Herbert Gleiter Institute of Nanoscience" at Nanjing.

IAS Senior Fellow Professor Way Kuo says information must be properly captured and scientifically analysed to improve our predictions and responses to a whole range of natural and human disasters, free from the interference of ideological biases.

The cover of Nature (4 May 2017, Volume 545, Number 7652) shows the microstructure of an exceptionally strong thin-film magnesium alloy captured using transmission electron microscopy. Produced by dual-phase nanostructuring, this alloy has a strength that approaches the ideal theoretical limit. Nanostructuring of crystalline metal alloys can yield high-strength materials, but these tend to soften as the strain is increased. In this latest work, IAS Senior Fellow Professor Jian Lu and his team combine the benefits of nanocrystallinity with those of single-phase amorphous metallic glasses to yield a dual-phase material --- MgCu2 nanocrystalline grains (6 nm) enclosed in an amorphous glassy shell (2 nm) --- that resulted in the strongest thin-film magnesium alloy to be made so far. Cover image: Susanna Siu & Ge Wu/City University of Hong Kong.