Professor Helen Meng
Helen Meng is Patrick Huen Wing Ming Chair Professor of Systems Engineering & Engineering Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She joined CUHK in 1998 and later became the first female department head in the Faculty of Engineering. She has also served as Associate Dean of Research, and oversaw research across all engineering departments. Her collaborations include partnerships with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), MIT, Tsinghua University, and the Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation. Her work with MSRA led to CUHK’s first Ministry of Education Key Laboratory in engineering. In 2019, her interdisciplinary team was awarded the first AI project under the HKSARG RGC Theme-based Research Scheme, developing AI technologies for dementia screening. She later founded and directs CUHK’s AI InnoCentre, the Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence. Helen led her department in launching Hong Kong’s first undergraduate FinTech degree in 2017. She also spearheaded the development of the city’s first pre-tertiary AI curriculum, with a focus on AI ethics, set for rollout in all local secondary schools in 2024 by the Education Bureau. The project earned the 2021 Hong Kong ICT Awards Smart Education and Learning Gold Award. Helen’s professional service roles include Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and member of the IEEE SPS Board of Governors, Awards Board, and Fellows Evaluation Committee. She also serves on the HKSAR Government’s Digital Economy Development Committee, eHealth Record Sharing Committee, Research Grants Council, RGC Engineering Panel, and Research Assessment Exercise Group. Recent accolades of Helen’s team include winning the US National Academy of Medicine’s Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge 2024, Gold and Silver Medals at the 49th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2024, Best Student Paper Awards at INTERSPEECH 2024 and 2023, and First Prize at the DialDoc@ACL 2022 Challenge. Helen herself has received the 2019 IEEE SPS Leo Beranek Meritorious Service Award for her leadership in and services for the Signal Processing Society, along with the HKCS 2015 Outstanding Women Professional Award, the 2017 HKWPEA Outstanding Women Professionals Award, and the 2022 JESSICA Most Successful Women Award. She is a Fellow of IEEE, ISCA, HKIE, and a Distinguished Fellow of HKCS.
Professor Sansanee Auephanwiriyakul
Sansanee Auephanwiriyakul received a B.Eng. (Hons.) degree in electrical engineering from Chiang Mai University, Thailand (1993); an M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering; and a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering and computer science, both from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1996, and 2000, respectively. After receiving her Ph.D. degree, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory, University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Auephanwiriyakul is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and an associate director of the Biomedical Engineering Institute, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, ECTI Transactions on Computer and Information Technology (ECTI-CIT), and was an Editorial Board of the Neural Computing and Applications, and other various major journals. She is a part of several IEEE CIS technical committees and several organizing committees of several major conferences. She has written many conference papers that have been published in several major conferences and journal papers published in several major journals.
Professor Hong (Vicky) Zhao
H. Vicky Zhao received her B.S. and M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and her Ph. D degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2004, all in electrical engineering. She was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, from 2006 to 2016. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her research interests include social network analysis, information security and forensics, digital signal processing and communications. Dr. Zhao received the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) 2008 Young Author Best Paper Award and the 2020 APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference Best Paper Award. She has co-authored 3 research monographs. She serves as a Member-at-Large of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors (2022-2024), and a Member-at-Large of the APSIPA Board of Governors (2024). She is an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2024).