4 Lessons for Graduates from Distingusihed 60th-Anniversary Graduation Speaker

Graduation Photo Gallery

AIT Scales Up to the Next Level of Knowledge Management with the Launch of AIT Share

SCG Collaborates with AIT to Unveil Thailand's First Reinvented Toilet

AIT Re-establishing its Brand in Europe — President visits 11 Universities

Seminars and Workshops

AIT Alumnus Appointed Acting Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan

Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award to Bernadette Resurreccion

AIT Publication Presents a New Paradigm for Sanitation 4.0

Geoinformatics Center Celebrates 20 Years

Social Media

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4 Lessons for Graduates from Distingusihed 60th-Anniversary Graduation Speaker

Be ready when an opportunity presents itself. Take calculated risks, especially when you are still young. Know thyself and have a vision. Finally, be a leader, not a follower.

These four lessons were offered by Prof. Tony F. Chan, President of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, at the 131st

graduation of AIT held on 17 May 2019. Offering lessons based on his personal experiences, when he, as a student opted for the newly emerging field of computer sciences,

Prof Chan quoted the example of Jeff Bezos who left a lucrative Wall Street job to start Amazon. Prof. Chan highlighted four significant changes in the operating environment of universities: globalization, changing expectations, technological disruption, and the emergence of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Universities will have to chart their own individual course in order to respond to these challenges, Prof. Chan said, as he enumerated four possible ways of responding: devising a global and international strategy, creating a balance between its long-term mission of creating knowledge and short-term societal expectations, encouraging technology and knowledge transfer, and creating an environment conducive to innovation and nurturing talent. “The case in point for AIT, in particular, is that Thailand and much of Southeast Asia are on China’s Belt and Road. How will it leverage this initiative?” Prof. Chan remarked.

Congratulating graduates, President Dr. Eden Y. Woon stated that the motto of the Institute’s sixtieth-anniversary is “Transforming AIT.” Exhorting students to embark on a path of lifelong learning and transformation, Dr. Woon stated that “any living organization or human being must transform or face irrelevance. In the same way, you have

to constantly learn and transform yourselves,” just as AIT realized that if you do not continuously renew yourself, you will soon become irrelevant, Dr. Woon said.

Photo Gallery

AIT Scales Up to the Next Level of Knowledge Management with the Launch of AIT Share

AIT is scaling up to the next level in knowledge sharing with the launch of AIT Share, an e-Learning platform aimed at educators, executives, students, or anyone interested in furthering their knowledge. The new platform, which comes with the slogan “Knowledge Worth Sharing,” allows participants to acquire new knowledge, improve their skills, take certificate courses, and obtain professional masters-level degrees.

Recounting the AIT Share journey was Dr. Naveed Anwar, AIT's Vice President for Knowledge Management, who spearheaded the initiative. “We began by creating an offline learning platform for the Ministry of Construction in Myanmar, where we offered e-courses and merged these with classroom-based instruction,” Dr. Naveed revealed. “This hybrid model was then replicated for the Sri Lanka Ports Authority, and over time, we created the fully-fledged knowledge portal that is being launched today,” he added. During this time, AIT Solutions, which was previously headed by Dr. Naveed, also created a Knowledge Lab as well as the AIT Smart Learning Lab.

AIT Share was jointly inaugurated on 24 May 2019 by Dr. Subin Pinkayan, Chair of the AIT Board of Trustees, and Dr. Eden Y. Woon, President of AIT.

SCG Collaborates with AIT to Unveil Thailand's First Reinvented Toilet

Thailand’s first toilet, the “SCG Reinvented Toilet” has been unveiled in Bangkok. The toilet includes an integrated waste treatment system that can disinfect waste and separate liquids and solids with 100% efficiency. Pilot units of the SCG Reinvented Toilet have been installed in a public space located next to the Khlong Phlabphla in Rama IX, Bangkok.

The SCG Reinvented Toilet was developed by Chemicals Business, SCG in collaboration with the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) to improve basic sanitation for communities and contribute to environmental sustainability. Initial development of the toilet was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Pilot units of the toilet were installed for public use on May 3, 2019 in Bangkok.

The self-contained toilet helps ensure safe waste disposal, prevents harmful pathogens from being released into rivers, and reduces the spread of infectious diseases. The invention also makes it possible to recover useful resources from solid waste and use them as soil conditioners.

Cholanat Yanaranop, President of Chemicals Business, SCG, stressed that the SCG Reinvented Toilet is the product of a collaboration between Chemicals Business, SCG, and AIT.

AIT Re-establishing its Brand in Europe — President visits 11 Universities

President Eden Woon this month led a two-week AIT international cooperation mission to five countries across Europe. From May 2-14, the president engaged with university leaders for bilateral cooperation at eleven distinguished universities in the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania, discussing bilateral relations, signing academic cooperation agreements at four institutions, laying the groundwork for future research collaboration, expanding exchange destinations for our students from Asia, and speaking at two international conferences.

Memorandums of Understanding and Academic Agreements for student and faculty exchange, workshops and training, research and double degree program cooperation were signed at France’s Emlyon Business School and Skema Business School, Lithuania’s Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and the University Politehnica of Bucharest in Romania.  More will be signed soon with several other universities which were visited on this trip.

The European cooperation mission was a catalyst to re-establish AIT internationally by actively positioning the AIT brand name on the continent and forging high-end transnational exchange agreements. At each university, President Woon laid out his plans for dramatically increasing AIT’s global imprint and injecting across-the-board innovation and entrepreneurship, while promoting our social impact legacy and expertise.

The AIT president found receptive senior-level ears to his new positioning message of “Social Impact with Innovation.” European university leaders expressed collective interest in his offer of direct collaboration in areas of common strength and complementary collaboration in areas where the partner university’s leading-edge innovation or advanced knowledge and technology could enhance AIT’s core strengths in the social impact arena in Asia.  

In Glasgow, Scotland, Prof. Sir Jim McDonald, Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde—home of former AIT President Alastair North—on May 3 welcomed President Woon and affirmed his interest to identify complementary modes of leading-edge cooperation in areas of common interest through a workshop and via the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund. Moving to England, the same held true at visits to the University of Sussex, the world-leading Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and Brunel University London.

In France, at Lyon’s The Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA), President Prof. Eric Maurincomme hosted a lunch and agreed to form a partnership in line with President Woon’s vision. At a private meeting in Paris with Eric Labaye, President of École Polytechnique, the AIT president proposed bespoke student exchanges and experiential learning cooperation. In Tallinn, Estonia, AIT also visited TalTech and the University of Tartu. Both universities expressed a desire to formalize MOU partnerships and Erasmus+ Inter-institute agreements.

On the final leg of the journey, President Woon addressed the 7th Asia-Europe Foundation Rector’s Conference held from May 11-14 in Bucharest, Romania. AIT’s mission and work mirrors the current global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he stressed.  This trip will bear fruit for AIT faculty and students in the coming months, and more such promotions of AIT globally will take place, thereby expanding our footprint and brand recognition around the world.

Seminars and Workshops

Seminar on Inequality and Development in Developing Asia

3 May

Prof. Donald Low, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)

South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) Summer School in Environmental and Resource Economics

5-19 May

Talk: Plastic Waste Reduction to Prevent Marine Litter

8 May 2019

Mr. Paradorn Chulajata, Chair, Plastic Industry Club

Special Seminar Series on Space Technology

23-24 May

Dr. Shinichi Nakamura, Space Tracking and Communication Center, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Tsukuba Space Center

AIT Alumnus Appointed Acting Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan

AIT alumnus Mr. Abdul Tawab Bala Karzai has been appointed Acting Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan. Mr. Bala Karzai was a student in Water Engineering and Management (WEM) from 2008-2010. After graduating, he joined Kandahar University, where he served as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Before this appointment, Mr. Bala Karzai served as Deputy Minister for Academic Affairs. It is in this capacity that he visited AIT in February 2018.

Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award to Bernadette Resurrección

The 2019 Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award has been awarded to Dr. Bernadette Resurrección, a former faculty member of AIT and currently Distinguished Adjunct Faculty at AIT. Named after Mary Fran Myers, the codirector of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, the award recognizes disaster professionals who promote research in gender issues in disaster and emergency management. Bernadette Resurrección is currently working as a Senior Research Fellow with the Stockholm Environment Institute’s (SEI) Asia Center. Highlighting her work at AIT, the award citation notes that “during her 13 years at AIT, Resurrección designed cutting-edge courses on gender, environment, and natural resource management.”

AIT Publication Presents a New Paradigm for Sanitation 4.0

A book by AIT authors posits a new paradigm for Sanitation 4.0. Focusing on regenerative sanitation and described by the authors as the next era in sanitation management, the new book by Prof. Thammarat Koottatep, Dr. Peter Emmanuel Cookey, and Prof. Chongrak Polprasert calls for a change in narrative and a rethinking of sanitation toward more progressive trajectories such as resource recovery and reuse rather than just amelioration.

Titled "Regenerative Sanitation: A New Paradigm for Sanitation 4.0," the 350-page book was published by International Water Association Publications. While Prof. Thammarat and Prof. Chongrak serve as AIT, at the time of writing, Dr. Peter Emmanuel Cookey, of the IHE Delft Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands, was working in Environmental Engineering and Management at AIT.

Geoinformatics Center Celebrates 20 Years

AIT’s Geoinformatics Center (GIC) celebrated its 20th anniversary by organizing an Open House on 30 May 2019. Showcasing the Center’s projects and especially its Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the event concluded with a talk on earthquake prediction by Prof Shunji Murai. Attending the event were representatives of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), faculty members from Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). GIC Director Dr. Manzul Hazarika, spoke about the Center’s focus and directions as it enters the next decade.

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Editor: Bajinder Pal Singh bajinder@ait.ac.th

Photos:

Paitoon Tinnapong

Samphat Semathong

Contact: Office of Public Affairs opa@ait.ac.th