PASCALE FUNG FACL FIEEE FAAAI FISCA

chair professor | department of electronic and computer engineering | hong kong university of science and technology

Professor Pascale Fung 冯雁

Director, Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)
Chair Professor, Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering
and Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2358 8537 / Fax: +852 2358 1485
Email: pascale at ece dot ust dot hk

BIOGRAPHY .

Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) , and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her "significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms", an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is an Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research centre on top of all four schools at HKUST. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST . She is an expert on the Global Future Council , a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society . She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standar d - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.

Prof. Fung was born in Shanghai to professional artist parents but found her calling in artificial intelligence when she became interested in science fiction as a child. Today, her research interest lies in building intelligent systems that can understand and empathise with humans. To achieve this goal, her specific areas of research are using statistical modelling and deep learning for natural language processing, spoken language systems, emotion and sentiment recognition, and other areas of AI. She served as Editor and Associate Editor for Computer Speech and Language, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Transactions for ACL, IEEE Signal Processing Letters. She served as a Committee Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technology Committee (SLTC) for six years. She is a past president t and a Board Member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistics Data and Corpus Based Approaches in NLP (SIGDAT) .

Prof. Fung received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1997. She worked and studied at AT&T Bell Labs (1993~1997), BBN Systems & Technologies (1992), LIMSI , CNRS, France (1991), Department of Information Science, Kyoto University , Japan (1989~1991), and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France (1988). She speaks seven European and Asian languages.

TEACHING .

ELEC 4230 (ELEC 4010i/COMP 4901i) Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
ELEC 5540 High Tech Innovation and Entrepreneurship

RECENT RESEARCH ACTIVITIES .

Director, Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE), HKUST
Past President and Board Member, Association for Computational Linguistics SIGDAT
Member-at-large, Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Co-Editor-in-Chief, ACL Rolling Review (ARR) System
Associate Editor, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Co-Chair, NeurIPS 2021
Editor, Computer Speech and Language (2015-2018)
Technical Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2018, 2020, 2024
Program Co-Chair, MT Summit XVI 2017
Keynote Speaker, “Managing Information and Debunking Misinformation in the Age of Covid-19”, Workshop on Social NLP @ACL 2020
Keynote Speaker, “Loquentes Machinis: Technology, Applications, and Ethics of Conversational Systems”, ACL 2019, Florence, Italy, 2019
Keynote Speaker, “Gender Roles in the AI World”, ACL Workshop on Gender Bias in NLP, Florence, Italy, 2019
Keynote Speaker, “Empathetic Machines”, 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki, Japan
Panelist, ICASSP Innovation Forum, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2018
Invited Expert Panelist, Control and Responsible Innovation in the Development of Autonomous Machines Experts Workshop, March 29-30, 2018
Invited Speaker, The Challenge of AI and How Robots can Benefit Humans”, Fudan University, Shanghai, March 2018
Invited Speaker, Stanford Women in Data Science Event, March 2018, Hong Kong

RECENT PUBLIC ACTIVITIES .

Member, Global Future Councils, World Economic Forum, 2016-present

Member, Partnership on AI, 2017-present
Member-at-large, Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Member, IEEE Standards Working Group on Recommended Guidelines for Organizational Governance of AI
Advisory Board Member, Joint UN, ESCAP, Google and APRU project and research network on AI for Social Good
Advisory Board Member, Building Agile Governance for AI & Robotics (BGI4AI)
Invited Speaker, The 3rd International Symposium on Symbiotic Intelligent Systems: A New Era Towards Responsible Robotics and Innovation, November 2020
Invited Speaker, CyFY 2020 ! In Search of Panacea: Tech in Times of Crisis, October 2020
Invited Speaker, The AI For Social Good Summit , October 2020
Invited Speaker, Virtual Global AI Summit, October 2020
Invited Panelist, UN Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Side Event: Predictability and Explainability of Military AI, September 2020
Invited Panelist, United Nations Association of the US Virtual Roundtable on Data Sharing, AI Cooperation, and the Transnational Response to COVID-19, September 2020
Invited Panelist, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Virtual Expert Group Meeting on “Socially just transition towards sustainable development: The role of digital technologies on social development and well-being of all”, August 2020
Keynote Speaker, Canton Tower Science and Technology Conference, October 2019

Invited Speaker, “The Revolution of Empathetic Conversational Systems”, Alibaba APSARA Conference, September 2019
Invited Panelist, “Ethics of AI”, West Coast NLP, Facebook HQ, Menlo Park, September 2019
Distinguished Lecturer Talk, “How to Make Machines Empathetic?”, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, August 2019
Invited Panelist, “40 Years of AI in China”, IJCAI, Macau, August 2019
Invited Panelist, Panel on Diversity, IJCAI, Macau, August 2019
Keynote Speaker, “Towards a More Gender Equal World in AI”, IJCAI Workshop on Humanizing AI, Macau, August 2019

▪ Invited Speaker, National Academies-Royal Society Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Washington DC, May 2019

Invited Panelist, UNCTAD- 22nd Annual Session of the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology Development, Geneva, May 2019

▪ Invited Keynote Speaker, Panel Discussion on Hong Kong-Shenzhen Collaboration, HKSAR, April 2019

Invited Speaker, “China and the US, Collaboration or Competition in AI?”, Asia Pacific AmCHam Business Summit, Hong Kong, March 2019

▪ Invited Panelist, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: AI is our biggest existential threat?”, Times Higher Education Research Excellence Summit, Sydney, February 2019

▪ Invited Panelist, “2018 Autonomous Driving Global Summit”, Guangzhou, November 2018
Keynote Speaker, “Robots with Heart - AI for the Bettermant of Humanity, DP Design Future Conference, Singapore, November 2018
Invited Speaker, Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, Brussels, October 2018
Invited Speaker, “Building Hong Kong Into a Global AI Centre”, One Country Two Systems Research Institute, Hong Kong, October 2018
Panelist, APRU-Google Project Workshop: AI4Every1, Hong Kong, August 2018
Panelist, “Our Digital Future in a Divided World”, 22nd APRU Presidents’ Meeting, Taipei, Taiwan, June 24-26, 2018
Keynote Speaker, “Rise of the Robot and Artificial Intelligence”, Goldman Sachs Women in Leadership Speaker Series, Goldman Sachs Hong Kong, May 24, 2018

Panelist, “High-Level Meeting on the European Union Strategy on Artificial Intelligence”, Brussels, March 2018

Invited Speaker, “Future Finance Adapting to Disruption”, Morgan Stanley Hong Kong, March 2018

▪ Invited Panelist, Thomson Reuters Forum, February 2018 Hong Kong
Invited Panelist, “Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions and Idioms”, Raisina Forum, New Delhi, India, January 2018