The 10th International Conference on Blended Learning (ICBL) and the 3rd International Symposium on Educational Technology (ISET) was held at the City University of Hong Kong from June 27th to 29th, 2017. More than 200 scholars and postgraduate students from over ten countries, including the US, Germany, Japan, Singapore and China, attended the conference. An SFS team of five English undergraduates, Li Meihui, Han Meiting, Chen Zejia, Mo Yiling, and Chen Xiuyan, led by Prof. Liu Xiaobin, jointly submitted the paper "Improving English Pronunciation via Automatic Speech Recognition Technology." The paper stood out of the 59 candidate papers and was awarded the Excellent Paper Award, the highest award ever that SFS undergraduates have won at an international conference in recent years.

As an empirical study, the paper by Li, et al., uses automatic speech recognition technology to match the English learners’ speech sounds with the original text they read out so as to improve the accuracy of their pronunciation. The paper also explores how the technology may be applied effectively by teachers.

The ICBL and ISET are held annually. China's Peking University was the host in 2016, and  Japan's Kansai University hosted the conferences in 2018.