Industry experience

Professor Michael Sung is a high-tech innovator and entrepreneur, and has started a number of successful ventures in the advanced materials and semiconductor industries and sits on the advisory board for various startups. Prof. Sung is an active early-stage investor as an angel investor and as a partner/advisor in a number of VC accelerator funds. He is the managing director for CarbonBlue Innovations, an investment and tech transfer platform to connect internationally-sourced innovation to China, particularly in the areas of smart hardware, industry 4.0, semiconductor, sustainability, and new material technologies.

Prof. Sung has a strong focus in intellectual property strategy, tech transfer, and high-tech commercialization. He is a board member of the HK Chapter of the International IP Commercialization Council whose mandate is to facilitate IP and tech transfer opportunities between China and international countries. Prof. Sung is very active in advising for the HK and Shenzhen governments on tech transfer and commercialization. He is currently responsible for helping to define the technology and implementation strategy the robotics and automation platform strategy for the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park and is also leading a task force to develop HK into a strategic hub for IOT/smart hardware innovation. Prof. Sung is also an advisor to the MIT Innovation Node in HK and chairs the steering committee for the MIT Tech Review EmTech Conference for HK

Professional experience

Prof. Sung has a strong focus in intellectual property strategy and technology roadmap development, with particular expertise in defining the strategy and development of early-stage IP. He is a member of the International IP Commercialization Council (HK Chapter) and on the Board of Volunteers. For the past 15+ years, Prof. Sung has focused on tech transfer business development for his group’s extensive IP portfolio, which to date consists of over 600+ patents. Prof. Sung is responsible for setting the IP strategy and developing applied research and commercialization roadmaps for his technology projects. He is an expert in forming licensing and commercialization strategies involving joint venturing/partnering with research institutions and companies. Prof. Sung has a proven track record in building start-up companies from scratch, capable of establishing strong startup teams and leading early-stage R&D development through to large-scale manufacturing. Prof. Sung has led various high-profile technology joint-development projects between the US/Taiwan into China and Japan with support from government and industrial partners.

While in graduate school, Prof. Sung was the principal investigator for the famed MIT Wearable Computing Group at the Media Lab, where graduated colleagues have gone on to lead projects from Google Glass to the recent Apple Watch. Prof. Sung was a pioneer in the field of wearable computing/IOT as an early innovator of wearable continuous physiologic sensing and health monitoring technologies. Prof. Sung was one of the first innovators to anticipate the quantified-self movement by using big data machine learning techniques to develop predictive human behavior models from long-term multi-modal context and physiologic data. He pioneered the use of non-invasive sensing technologies to develop predictive systems for applications ranging from triaging army rangers for hypothermia (along with the U.S. Army Research Institute for Environment Medicine) to developing the world’s first objective quantitative measure and predictive model for patients

Other experience

Prof. Sung has faculty positions at both the engineering and business schools at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he drives initiates and teaches topics related to hi-tech entrepreneurship and innovation. A regular invited speaker at various technical conferences and industry events, Prof. Sung is the author of over 10 patents & 80 conference/journal papers. He has received various awards for technology entrepreneurship including Jiangsu Province’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Talent People Program and MIT Enterprise Forum’s Most Visionary Technology Award. One of his projects on large-scale graphene manufacturing was recently selected for Google’s Solve for X Prize, the first project ever selected from China/HK. Prof. Sung received his Ph.D. in EECS while working at the MIT Media Lab/Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also has a graduate financial engineering degree from MIT Sloan Business School.