Prof. Pascale FUNG, Electronic and Computer Engineering, has been elected a 2022 Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) “for significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms”. She was one of only 10 Fellows elected.

The AAAI fellows program recognizes individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Fellows’ accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI, to unusual accomplishments in AI technology and AI applications.

Prof. Fung’s research interest lies in building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans. To achieve this goal, her specific areas of research are using statistical modeling and deep learning for natural language processing, spoken language systems, emotion and sentiment recognition, and other areas of AI.

She is the Director of HKUST Center for AI Research (CAiRE) and co-founded the Human Language Technology Center. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Prof. Fung has been active in providing professional services to the international community. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum, and 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 and is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard – Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. She is a past president and a board member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistic Data and Corpus-Based Approaches to Natural Language Processing. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL annual meeting, as well as ACL and Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshops.