| Pascale Fung | |
| Birth Date: | Shanghai |
| Education: | PhD from Columbia University in 1997 |
| Alma Mater: | PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University |
| Occupation: | Professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology |
| Employer: | Hong Kong University of Science & Technology |
| Website: | Personal website |
Pascale Fung (馮雁) (born in Shanghai, China) is a professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology(HKUST). She is the director of the Centre for AI Research (CAiRE) at HKUST. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”,[1] an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions” [2] [3] and an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions toward statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”.[4]
She is a member of the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, a think tank of the World Economic Forum, and blogs for the Forum's online publication Agenda.[5] She is a member of the Partnership on AI. She has been invited as an AI expert to different government initiatives in China, Japan, the UAE, India, the European Union and the United Nations.
Fung's publication topics include spoken language systems, natural language processing, and empathetic human-robot interaction. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC) and is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute, both at HKUST.[6] Additionally, she is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST.[7] She is actively involved in encouraging young women into careers in engineering and science.[8]
Fung's work is focused on building systems that try to understand and empathize with humans. She has authored and co-authored hundreds of publications, along with many journal listings and book chapters.[9] [10] [11] Fung is often found in the media, among others as a writer for Scientific American,[12] the World Economic Forum, and the London School of Economics,[13] and the Design Society. She was a pioneer in using statistical models for natural language understanding. Her PhD thesis proposed unsupervised methods for aligning texts and mining dictionary translations in different languages by distributional properties. She is an expert in spoken language understanding and computer emotional intelligence, and is a strong proponent of technology transfer. Fung has applied many of her research group's results in the fields of, among others, robotics, IoT, and financial analytics. Her efforts led to the launch of the world's first Chinese natural language search engine in 2001, the first Chinese virtual assistant for smartphones in 2010, and the first emotional intelligent speaker in 2017.
Fung is affiliated with the following institutions and organizations: