Helen Meng

Patrick Huen Wing Ming Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM), The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Professor Helen Meng is Patrick Huen Wing Ming, Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She has been Founding Director of the Center for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence since 2020, which is a CUHK-led InnoHK Center on AI located at the Hong Kong Science Park. In 2019, she was awarded the first Hong Kong Research Grant Council’s Theme-based Research Grant in the field of AI, which supports her interdisciplinary team to develop AI-enabled spoken language technologies to screen and diagnose neurocognitive disorder (a.k.a. dementia).

Since 2019, Prof. Meng has been Co-PI and Chair of Curriculum Development of the CUHK Jockey Club AI for the Future Project and developed the first comprehensive pre-tertiary AI education curriculum in Hong Kong, adopted by the Government’s Education Bureau. She founded the Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Human-Centric Computing and Interface Technologies in 2005, which was recognized as a Ministry of Education of China Key Laboratory in 2008 and was the first female Chairman of the SEEM Department at CUHK between 2012 and 2018.

Prof. Meng has delivered numerous plenary, keynote, and invited talks at flagship conferences, including Grand Challenge Speaker of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2022, Plenary Speaker of IEEE ICASSP 2021, Keynote Speaker of ACL 2021. She and her research team have received various awards; the most recent ones include the 1st Prize of the international DialDoc@ACL 2022 Challenge, SciTech Challenge 2021 Open Category Championship, 2016 Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (one of 32 academics worldwide). Prof. Meng is a Fellow of the IEEE, ISCA, HKIE, and HKCS and has served in various government appointments. Most recently, she was appointed a member of the HKSAR Government’s Digital Economy Development Committee chaired by the Financial Secretary, in which she also serves as Convenor of the Talent Cultivation Sub-group.