SENG Distinguished Research Excellence Awardee Prof Qiang Yang Gives Keynote on Artificial Intelligence

19/12/2016

SENG Distinguished Research Excellence Awardee Prof Qiang Yang Gives Keynote on Artificial Intelligence

(From left): Mr Man-Kwai Lee, Director and General Manager of New Bright Industrial Co Ltd; Prof Tim Kwang Ting Cheng, Dean of Engineering; New Bright Professor of Engineering Prof Qiang Yang, recipient of SENG Distinguished Research Excellence Award 2016; Prof Wei Shyy, Executive Vice-President and Provost; and Ms Gemma Wong, Director of New Bright Industrial Co Ltd [Download Photo]

The recipient of the School of Engineering (SENG) Distinguished Research Excellence Award 2016, Prof Qiang Yang, delivered an insightful keynote on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence Under Big Data and Small Data” on December 14, 2016. The keynote received an overwhelming response with over 180 participants, including industry members, government representatives, friends, faculty, students and alumni.

Prof Yang is the New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In his talk, he shared an overview of his research in transfer learning, which adapts a learned model from a big data to new situations where only small data might be available. He also discussed foundations and different transfer learning methods, as well as their applications in a number of application domains, including recommender systems, sentiment analysis and dialog systems. The keynote was followed by a cocktail reception, where participants had a joyful gathering in a festive ambience.

Prof Yang is a world-leading authority on transfer learning, an important area of research related to machine learning, data mining and big data. His significant publications include a 2007 International Conference on Machine Learning paper, written together with his students and proposing the TrAdaboost system; and “A Survey on Transfer Learning”, which is a must-read in the transfer learning area. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and has a Google Scholar citation record of 30,000.

The Research Excellence Awards scheme was established by the School in 2011 to recognize and reward faculty members for their research impact and contributions. The awards are classified into three categories for academics at different stages of their careers, namely Distinguished Research Excellence Award, Research Excellence Award, and Young Investigator Award. The first one is the highest-level accolade which honors an eminent faculty member with exceptional research achievements and significant impact locally and globally. The keynote forms part of this award and is an honor in itself.