Pascale Fung

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”, an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions” 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”.

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. 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. Additionally, she is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is actively involved in encouraging young women into careers in engineering and science.