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Yi R. (May) Fung is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, after which she spent time visiting MIT as a postdoctoral researcher. May drives cutting-edge research in the domain of human-centric trustworthy AI/NLP model reasoning, with cognitively grounded scalable alignment principles and a focus on advancing robust multimodal knowledge awareness mechanisms. In particular, she has published over 30 papers at top-tier machine learning venues along the topics of agentic frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-lingual sociocultural-adaptive situation understanding for diverse real-world applications (e.g., business, software, healthcare, education, media communication). Her stellar research has received many prestigious recognition internationally, including the ACL’24 Outstanding Paper Award, NAACL’24 Outstanding Paper Award, and NAACL’21 Best Demo Paper Award. In addition, she serves on the Organizing Committee for IJCAI, as Area Chair for ACL/EMNLP/ACL-RR, and as Program Chair for ACM Multimedia System (MMSys). She leads a young, energetic, and growing research lab, with a number of students awarded or nominated highly selective HKPFS/RedBird merit fellowships.

Highlights

🎓 We're actively recruiting undergraduate RA (non-paid) and fully-funded PhD/MPhil students!

🎉 Unlocked 5-6 papers in the ACL'25 acceptance range by review score, the top half with my lab as primary driver - at a time when I lead a lab of only 2-3 students. Congrats to the team!

📝 Invited to interview by Ta Kung Pao, mainstream Chinese media with longest running history, 2025

Last update: 02/2025