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Professors from the Faculty of Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have been recognised by their inclusion in the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List (AI 2000). Among those included, three scholars, Professors Irwin Kuo Chin KING, Michael Rung Tsong LYU, and Sean Xiaoou TANG have been named in the list in multiple fields while eight scholars have been recognized each in one field. The awardees have earned international acclaim for their research excellence in artificial intelligence. For the awardee list, please refer to table 1.

The list is jointly announced by Tsinghua-Chinese Academy of Engineering’s Joint Research Center for Knowledge and Intelligence, and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University. It is automatically generated and determined by computer algorithms deployed in a system called AMiner that tracks and ranks scholars based on citation counts collected from top-tier publications over the past ten years. The most-cited scholars with lasting contributions and impact on global AI development are recognised by the system. 

The list covers 20 sub-fields, including Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence/ The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI/IJCAI), Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Knowledge Engineering, Speech Recognition, Data Mining, Information Retrieval and Recommendation, Databases, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, Multimedia, Visualisation, Security and Privacy, Computer Networking, Computer Systems, Theory of Computation, Chip Technology and Internet of Things. AI 2000 has been widely recognised by world-renowned universities and organisations, including the University of California Berkeley, Cornell University and Duke University.

Professor Irwin Kuo Chin KING

Professor Irwin KING, Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has three appearances in multiple fields including AAAI/IJCAI, Information Retrieval and Recommendation, and Data Mining. He has made significant accomplishments in AI and served as an editorial member for a number of international journals. Professor KING has contributed over 300 technical papers in top journals and 30 academic articles for books. He has also owned six international patents including the VeriGuide system. It is a plagiarism detection software which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of students’ submitted assignments with hundreds of millions of text-based electronic documents in the University library, to promote academic integrity and honesty. Professor KING is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Chairman of the International Neural Network Society (INNS).

In recent years, Professor KING has actively promoted e-learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With funding support from the University Grants Committee, he launched the first e-learning platform in Hong Kong named “KEEP” (Knowledge & Education Exchange Platform), developed with local education institutions. KEEP aims to offer an online educational portal with different e-learning tools, technology applications and education resources, to support the global development of teaching and learning with cutting-edge technology.

Professor Michael Rung Tsong LYU

An international expert in software reliability engineering and software fault tolerance, Professor Michael LYU, Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is listed in three sub-fields including AAAI/IJCAI, Information Retrieval and Recommendation, and Data Mining. He has been dedicated to research in software engineering, dependable computing, distributed systems, cloud computing, services computing, big data analytics, and machine learning. He participated in more than 30 industrial projects in these areas and helped to develop many commercial systems and software tools. He has also published over 550 refereed journals and conference papers in his research areas and received more than 35,000 citations. Professor LYU was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2004 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2007. He was also named Croucher Senior Research Fellow in 2008, IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year in 2010, ACM Fellow in 2015, and received the Overseas Outstanding Contributions Award from the China Computer Federation (CCF) in 2018.

Professor Sean Xiaoou TANG

Professor Sean TANG, Professor of the Department of Information Engineering has two appearances, in the fields of Computer Vision and Multimedia. Professor TANG has been devoted to the study of pattern recognition and video processing and established the Multimedia Laboratory at CUHK in 2001. His research team has been the first to apply deep learning to computer vision and has been named as one of the pioneers in AI research. The team has built a novel facial recognition system that achieved the world’s highest accuracy of 99%. Its accuracy outperformed human eyes in human face verification performance for the very first time. The commercial group SenseTime he founded in 2014 has quickly entered the unicorn league, making waves around the globe.

As early as 2009, Professor TANG and his PhD student, Dr. Kai Ming HE of the Department of Information Engineering, together with another expert, won the Best Paper Award for the paper entitled “Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior” at the prestigious IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). It was the first time since the establishment of the conference that Asians had received this top honour. Dr. HE, currently a research scientist of Facebook AI Research, has also been recognised in the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List this year with his excel achievements in AI technology.

Table 1: CUHK Awardee List of AI 2000