| | Professor Pascale Fung 冯雁 Director, Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE) |
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 promoting human-centric AI. 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 standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. She was a Distinguished Consultant on Responsible AI at Meta in 2022, and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google in 2023. 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 frontier AI models that benefit humans and society and in understanding the emerging capabilities and limitations of such models in order to render them more controllable and trustworthy. She was a past 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, BBN Systems & Technologies, LIMSI, CNRS, France,Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan, and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France. She speaks seven European and Asian languages.
RECENT ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES.
- Director, Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE), HKUST
- Past President and founding Board Member, Association for Computational Linguistics SIGDAT
- Past Member-at-large, Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
- Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief, ACL Rolling Review (ARR) System (2020-2022)
- Associate Editor, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
- Past Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Co-Chair, NeurIPS 2021
- Past Editor, Computer Speech and Language (2015-2018)
- Technical Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2018, 2020, 2024
- Invited Talk, "Machines Make Up Stuff: Why Do Generative Models Hallucinate?", AAAI 2024, Vancouver, February 2024
- Fireside Chat with Yann LeCun and Harry Shum, “AI New Horizons 2023: Exploring the Future of Artificial Intelligence”, AI NEW HORIZONS 2023: A Symposium with Scientific Leaders, Hong Kong, 18 November 2023.
- Invited Speaker, “Can we envision a new Renaissance with AI”, XIS experience Innovation Summit 2023, Milan, Italy, 23 Oct 2023.
- Invited Talk, “Safer Generative ConvAI”, IJCAI-23, Macao, 22 August 2023.
- Invited Speaker, “Safer Generative ConvAI”, ICML 2023, Hawaii, USA, 29 July 2023.
Panelist, “Fostering Women's Leadership in the Realm of Emerging Trends and Technologies” The 4th Women in Machine Learning Un-Workshop, ICML 2023, Hawaii, USA, 28 July 2023.
Invited Speaker, “Edinburgh Futures Conversations: The Future of Artificial Intelligence - Shaping our AI Futures”, The University of Edinburgh, Online, 7 March 2023.
RECENT PUBLIC ACTIVITIES.
- Member, Global Future Councils, World Economic Forum, 2016-present
- Member, Partnership on AI, 2017-present
- 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)
- Member, Expert Network of the United Nations Advisory Body on AI Governance
- Invited Speaker, “TRANSCENDING COLLABORATION - Through the Looking Glass: Are We Ready for the Age of AI?”, Dubai Future Form, Dubai, 27-28 November 2023
Panelist, “AI as a Driving Force for Industry and Economy”, AMGFC, Dubai, 18 Oct 2023.
Panelist, “Trust and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence”, Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipation Summit, Geneva, 12 October 2023.
Invited Speaker, “Impacts of AI on Higher Education” DAU8, Webinar, 13 July 2023.
Keynote Speaker, “Ethics of AI”, The EuropIA Institute, Italy, 3 July 2023.
Invited Speaker, “ Hacking Machines for Humanity with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology”, World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023, Tianjin, China, 27 June 2023.
Panelist, “Stakeholder Dialogue (Panel) – Generative AI: Friend or Foe?”, World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023, Tianjin, China, 27 June 2023.
- Co-Chair and Steering Committee, “Responsible AI Leadership: A Global Summit on Generative AI”, World Economic Forum, San Francisco, USA, 24-28 April 2023.
- Co-chair and Panelist, “Responsible development of generative AI models”, Responsible AI Leadership Summit 2023: Generative AI, Presidio, SF, April 2023.
Panelist, “AI ethics and governance”, UK-China Workshop, British Embassy, Beijing, 22 March 2023.