Pascale Fung

Pascale Fung is a Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the founding Director of InterACT at HKUST, a joint research and education center with Carnegie Mellon University, University of Karlsruhe (TH) and Waseda University. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. Prof. Fung's research interests lies in building intelligent systems that can understand and empathise with humans. To achieve this goal, her specific areas of research are statistical natural language processing, spoken language systems, emotion and sentiment recognition, and predictive analytics. She is an Editor for Computer Speech and Language and former Associate Editor of a number of IEEE/ACM/ACL journals. She has chaired and area-chaired the top conferences in the speech and language fields. She served as a Committee Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technology Committee (SLTC) for six years. She is the Vice-President and a Board Member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistics Data and Corpus Based Approaches in NLP (SIGDAT). Prof. Fung has also co-founded a number of multinational companies focused on natural language interfaces and personalized recommendation systems for internet users and corporate customers. She has been an Associate Chair of the HKUST One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition. She pioneered and has been teaching Engineering Entrepreneurship since 2007. Prof. Fung received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1997. She worked and studied at AT&T Bell Labs (1993~1997), BBN Systems & Technologies (1992), LIMSI, CNRS, France (1991), Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan (1989~1991), and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France(1988).