On May 6, 2026, the Department of Politics and Public Administration (PPA) at The University of Hong Kong successfully hosted the DaSPPA Festival 2026. Held at the Jockey Club Tower, the dynamic poster session served as the final showcase for POLI3148 – “Data Science in Politics and Public Administration”, taught by Professor Haohan Chen.

The event was a celebration of incredible student hard work and computational innovation. In his opening remarks, Professor Robert Thomson, Head of the PPA Department, commended the impressive training outcomes of the course. He noted that in just a single semester, students developed a solid command of data science methods and successfully applied them to substantive questions in public policy and political research.

The festival featured 36 undergraduate and postgraduate students across 18 groups, who presented original research at the intersection of AI, data science, and politics. Utilizing data visualization, machine learning, and text mining, the students analyzed real-world political data to highly impressive results.

The room was filled with a collegial and cross-cohort atmosphere as over 30 faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, research postgraduate students, and visiting scholars engaged with the presenters. The event also featured cross-group peer voting, culminating in awards presented to four outstanding groups, including a special honour for Best Poster Design.

Congratulations to all the students on a remarkably successful semester!