Sign-Up Form: [Sept 1st, 2026, Tues] Exploring AI-Supported Learning with Ark Junior – Fill out form
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 according to the difficulty of the concept and, if desired, speaking in a cloned version of the instructor’s voice. 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). He will discuss how the course materials were developed, what the interaction data and post-course survey reveal, and where such tools earn their place in humanities teaching—and where they do not.
About the Speakers
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 artificial intelligence, with particular attention to how intelligent systems shape human judgement, perception, and influence in digital environments. He also works at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and applied ethics. At HKU, he designs and leads courses on AI, digital technologies, and the ethics of influence, incorporating peer review, AI tools, and hands-on experimentation into philosophical inquiry.
Dr Villena received the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award 2024–25 and was recognised as a Teaching Star @HKU.
Prof. Zheng Zhang (zz) is the Founder and Chief Scientist of The HKU Shanghai Cross Innovation Lab (HKU SH X-Lab), a research institute in Shanghai affiliated with the School of Computing & Data Science at The University of Hong Kong.
He was a Senior Principal Scientist and the Founding Director of the Amazon Web Services Shanghai AI Lab. He was also a Global Network Professor of Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, with affiliated appointments at the Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the NYU Center for Data Science at NYU’s New York campus. Previously, he founded the System Research Group and served as Principal Researcher and Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research Asia.
Prof. Zhang holds a PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an MS from The University of Texas at Dallas, and a BS from Fudan University. He was a founder and adviser of several deep-learning platforms, including MXNet, MinPy, and DGL, which brings deep learning to graph applications. In 2025, he released LLM4LLM, an open-source self-learning course exploring education in the AI era.
Seminar Details
Title: Exploring AI-Supported Learning with Ark Junior
Subtitle: From Slides to Dialogue: Teaching with Ark Junior, an AI-Powered Classroom
Date: September 1 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
This event is hosted by the HKU Arts Tech Lab.