Dr. Alan Fung

"You don’t usually feel electricity, but when you do, you get shocked," says Alan Fung. He learned that lesson the hard way as an adolescent, when a few shocks steered him away from electrical engineering. Instead, he went on to explore his fascination with mechanics. And yet, Fung still found himself researching energy throughout his career.

What started out with a government-funded initiative in clean coal technology has evolved into today's passion for innovative applications of renewable energy, such as sewage-based hybrid systems that can heat and cool large buildings by harnessing the flow of wastewater. Fung's work within the net-zero energy landscape is allowing buildings and communities to locally generate enough energy to fulfil annual consumption needs, while his use of AI machine learning helps tune energy usage on a real-time basis. The technology has the potential to lessen the strain on local utility grids, reduce energy costs for homeowners and, most notably, achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within the building sector. In a world where climate change advocates are calling for a carbon-neutral future, AI just might be the key to solving our CO2 problem.