Group for Interventional Robotic and Imaging Systems (IRIS)

Ka-Wai Kwok received the B.Eng. and M.Phil. degrees from Department of Automation and Computer-aided Engineering (aka. Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE) currently), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2003 and 2005, respectively. In 2012, he obtained the Ph.D. degree from the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Department of Computing, Imperial College London. After then, he was awarded the Croucher Foundation Fellowship 2013, which supported his research jointly supervised by advisors in The University of Georgia, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

 

Currently, Ka-Wai is a Professor at MAE, CUHK. Before then, he served as faculty for Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), in 2014-2024. His research interests focus on surgical robotics, intra-operative image processing, and their uses of control and intelligent systems. He has participated in various designs of robotic devices/interfaces for endoscopy, and MRI-guided interventions. To date, he has co-authored >165 peer-reviewed articles with >80 clinical fellows and >160 scientists/engineers. His multidisciplinary work has been recognized with various (>10) awards in international conferences/journals, e.g. the largest flagship conferences of robotics, ICRA and IROS. He was the recipient of ICRA Best Conference Paper Award in 2018, and IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award in 2020. He also obtained awards in his early career for robotics, e.g. the Early Career Awards 2015/16 offered by Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, Actuators 2020 Young Investigator Award, HKU 2019-2020 Outstanding Young Researcher Award, HKU Young Innovator Award 2020 and HKU Research Output Prize 2021-22.

 

Being IEEE Senior Member, Ka-Wai serves editor boards for IROS 2017-22, ICRA 2019-23, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), as well as Annals of Biomedical Engineering (ABME) and Proc. IMechE Part I: Journal of Systems & Control Engineering (JSCE). He is the principal investigator of group for Interventional Robotic and Imaging Systems (IRIS), which has (>5) inventions licensed/transferred from university to industry in support for their commercialization. He is also a co-founder and director of Agilis Robotics Limited aiming at advancing the interventional endoscopy with small, flexible robotic instruments and their intelligent control systems.