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Prof. Peter Tak-shing Yum and Prof. Helen Mei-Ling Meng of the Faculty of Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have been elected Fellows of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2013 for their remarkable accomplishments in ‘architecture and resource management of communication networks’ and ‘spoken language and multimodal systems’. This year, 297 scholars were elected IEEE fellows worldwide. With the two newly-elected fellows, the total number of IEEE fellows in CUHK has risen to 30. 

Architecture and resource management of communication networks 

Prof. Peter Yum is an expert in the area of wireless communications and internet, currently serving as Professor of Information Engineering at CUHK and Chief Technology Officer of Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI). Professor Yum received his BS, MS, MPh and PhD degrees in Columbia University, and started his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories working on switching and signaling systems. Professor Yum joined CUHK in 1982 and assisted Prof. Sir Charles Kao, former CUHK Vice-Chancellor, to establish the Department of Information Engineering and served as the founding director of the Information Engineering programme. He was appointed chairman of the Department twice and elected Dean of Engineering for two consecutive terms, having made great contributions to the development of the Faculty of Engineering.

Professor Yum’s research interests lie in routing, buffer management, deadlock handling, message resequencing, multi-access protocols, cellular network, lightwave networks, video distribution networks, 3G networks, RFID, sensor networks and wireless positioning technologies. He has made significant contributions to the telecommunications industry and has substantial research experience through partnerships with large corporations such as Bell Labs, Bellcore (now Telcordia), IBM Research, Motorola Semiconductors, Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan, SmarTone Communications and Radio Television Hong Kong. 

Professor Yum’s current research addresses human centric computing, cloud computing and big data, aiming to enhance technological competitiveness of Hong Kong through applied research. He was appointed the Fulbright Hong Kong Distinguished Scholar in 2006 and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in UK in 2008, giving lectures in various UK universities. He has been appointed Adjunct Professor by major universities in China including South East University, Zhejiang University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Since 2008 he has also been appointed Chair Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science of Tsinghua University. 

Spoken language and multimodal systems 

Prof. Helen Meng is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management. She obtained her BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joining CUHK in 1998, Professor Meng has established the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory and the Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory on Human-centric Computing and Interface Technologies to support research in human-centric computing, especially in the area of speech and language technologies, and the latter was conferred the status of a Key Laboratory in 2008 by the Ministry of Education (MoE). In 2009, Professor Meng received the MoE Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award in Technological Advancements which recognized her research in ‘Multimodal User Interfaces with Multilingual Speech and Language Technologies – Research and Applications’, becoming the first engineer to receive the award outside mainland China. She was named ‘Peng Cheng Visiting Professor’ of Tsinghua University Graduate School of Shenzhen in 2008 and is also the founding director of theTsinghua-CUHK Joint Research Center on Media Sciences, Technologies and Systems. In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Professor Meng also established the Ambient Intelligence and Multimodal Systems Laboratory in the CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technologies. She has also received the CUHK Faculty of Engineering Exemplary Teaching Award, Young Researcher Award and Service Award for her outstanding achievement and teaching and research.  

Professor Meng is an expert in speech and language technologies and has been studying how they can be adapted and integrated into multilingual and spoken language systems.  She has also conducted significant research in integrating speech with gestures in intelligent, multimodal user interfaces. Her approaches towards the development of innovative technologies are theoretically grounded in acoustic-phonetics, phonology, linguistics, signal processing and pattern recognition. Being the principal investigator in many research projects, Professor Meng has invented a computer-aided pronunciation training system that helps improve Chinese learners’ proficiency in English. She has also led the development of one of the first trilingual human-computer spoken dialog systems; the multimodal biometric authentication systems that combine voiceprint, fingerprint and facial image recognition; one of the first English-Chinese translingual retrieval systems; a Cantonese text-to-speech synthesis system to support reading software for the visually impaired community; and an audiovisual speech synthesis system for both Cantonese and Mandarin to support a talking avatar. Professor Meng is dedicated to serving the public and has been a member of the Digital 21 Advisory Committee, Joint Committee on Information Technology for the social welfare sector and the Research Grants Council. 

About IEEE 

The IEEE is the world’s largest professional organization, with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries.  IEEE members play a vital role in computer science, electronics, telecommunications and engineering fields etc.  Fellowship is the highest grade of membership and one of the most prestigious honours the IEEE can bestow upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.