I am the Co-founder and Chief Research & Innovation Officer at AMI Labs. Previously, I served as Senior Director of AI Research at Meta-FAIR.
I am a Chair Professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). I am also a Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
I am a Fellow of AAAI for “significant contributions to conversational AI and ethical AI principles,” a Fellow of ACL for “contributions towards statistical NLP and building empathetic systems,” a Fellow of IEEE for “contributions to human-machine interactions,” and a Fellow of ISCA for “fundamental contributions to spoken language human-machine interactions.”
My research focuses on building frontier AI models that benefit humans and society, with emphasis on understanding emerging AI capabilities to improve controllability and trustworthiness. Key areas include conversational AI, ethical AI, statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and human-machine interactions.
I served as Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE) at HKUST from 2018 to 2024. I am the co-founder of the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC), a past President and founding Board Member of ACL SIGDAT, the Founding Chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST, and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
I received my PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University. I have worked at AT&T Bell Labs, BBN Systems & Technologies, LIMSI-CNRS (France), Kyoto University (Japan), and École Centrale Paris (France). I speak seven European and Asian languages.
AI systems that avoid societal biases, maintain factual accuracy, and include safeguards against misuse.
Machine learning for healthcare, misinformation detection, bias mitigation, and life science applications.
Safer generative dialogue systems addressing hallucinations, toxicity, fluency, and reasoning.
Addressing linguistic bias in NLP by developing resources for underrepresented languages in Asia and Africa.
Integrating visual and linguistic understanding for multimodal AI systems.
Machines that recognize human emotions, intent, sarcasm, and distress through speech, language, and facial expressions.
Elderly care solutions covering nutrition, medication, wellness monitoring, and home navigation.
AI-generated art, design applications, and machine creativity in collaboration with Central Academy of Fine Arts.