Hi There, Welcome!

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 multimodal knowledge robustness mechanisms. In particular, she has published near 40 papers at top-tier machine learning venues along the topics of MLLM agentic frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-lingual cross-culture situation understanding for diverse real-world applications (e.g., software, healthcare, business, education, media communication). Her stellar research has received much 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 NeurIPS/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. Her work has been reported by various mainstream news outlets, including TVB News and The Paper 澎湃新聞.

Highlights

🎓 We're actively recruiting PhD/MPhil/PostDoc (fully-funded) and Undergrad RAs (self-funded) - fill out interest form here if interested.

🎉 Excited to announce the launch of Ren.AI Lab, for advancing human-centric trustworthy AI/NLP reasoning. Here's a comprehensive slide deck in progress of who we are and what we do - collaborations welcomed!

📝 Also serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS this year as well.

Last update: 02/2025