The UW-CUHK exchange program is a team of ten undergraduate students from both the University of Washington (UW) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The project is under the supervision of Prof. Mari Ostendorf from the Department of Electrical Engineering at UW and Prof. Helen Meng from the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at CUHK. The exchange is an extension of the 13th Budding Scholars Exchange Program through the United College of CUHK. What makes this exchange a unique endeavor for both universities, is that it is the first of its kind as a collaborative trans-Pacific research exchange project.

The goal of the program is to provide undergraduate students with experience in cutting-edge technology research and cross-cultural interaction. Each university has a multi-disciplinary team of five students with majors in fields as diverse as computer science, business, informatics, English, and electrical engineering. Both teams will work together for a period of four months on a single project under the theme of mobile computing. The CUHK team will first come to the United States to work together with the UW team on the initial project planning stage. Over the next three months they will collaborate on the project via video conferencing, a project website, online discussions, and other means of communication. The culmination of the project will be a public presentation of the team's work at CUHK when the UW team travels to Hong Kong in November 2003.