CCST9080 Fintech: Financial Inclusion, Emerging Markets, and Social Value [Section 2A, 2025]
Instructor: Prof. Ka-Ho Chow [Homepage]
Email: kachow@cs.hku.hk
Office Hours: By Appointment
Lectures: Wednesdays 13:00 - 14:50 @ MWT2
Teaching Assistants: Yuchen Fu (fuyuchen@connect.hku.hk), Yifeng Lin (yflin01f@connect.hku.hk), Yazheng Yang (yangyazh@connect.hku.hk), Yuer Yang (yueryang@connect.hku.hk)
Course Description
FinTech (Financial Technology) has revolutionized how traditional financial services can be provided to the general public and prompted financial service providers to re-consider how they should do business across an expansive, and expanding, range of commercial enterprises. This course will trigger students to think about how FinTech can tackle important global issues, both social and financial, and open up new and emerging markets. The course, which will be interactive and make use of different forms of multi-media, will focus on the following themes. How best:
- to let unbanked/underbanked entities (e.g. those in poor countries) to enjoy financial services and provide equal opportunities to women and men in terms of financial inclusion;
- to enable SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and the microfinance sector to benefit from the rise of digital technologies for various financial services and AI technologies; and
- to explore emerging business opportunities and markets (e.g. virtual banking and decentralized finance) based on FinTech technologies while understanding the security, privacy and regulatory issues behind.
CCST9076 Attention Magnet: The Psychological and Technological Aspects of Social Media Addiction [Section 1A, 2025]
Why do we feel compelled to constantly check social media? Does individual overuse of social media have an accumulative effect on our society? Can we make any productive changes to ourselves and social media platforms to mitigate our addiction to social media? This course will integrate interdisciplinary knowledge to uncover the driving forces behind social media addiction. The reasons causing people to get addicted to social media are not limited to personal characteristics and include the design and artificial intelligence used by the platforms themselves. In this course, we will introduce both the underlying technical mechanisms and psychological factors that cause behavioral addiction to social media. In addition, the accumulative effect of social media addiction on our personal and professional lives, as well as societies across the world, will be discussed. Through a variety of interactive and reflective learning activities, this course will drive a collective effort among students to develop solutions for minimizing social media addiction and maximizing the beneficial use of social media in both social and academic settings.