Media

HKU AI team wins “Facebook Low Resource Neural Machine Translation Award”

13 Jun 2018

 

An HKU team led by Professor Victor On-Kwok Li, Chair of Information Engineering and Cheng Yu Tung Professor in Sustainable Development in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) has won the prestigious international award, “The Facebook Low Resource Neural Machine Translation Award”.  

The Facebook selection panel expressed their congratulations to the winning team, “I’d like to highlight that the selection process was difficult, given the large volume of high-quality proposals that we received this year. Your proposal was selected because of its innovativeness, potential for impact and overall quality. We are very excited to collaborate with you and your team!”

This award is open to all universities, and only four awards have been granted worldwide. As one of the four global winners, the HKU team will be invited to present their work at the Facebook Headquarters in early 2019, and will take this opportunity to showcase their research strengths in Natural Language Processing (NLP).  Other team members of the winning team include Mr. Jiatao Gu and Ms Yun Chen, PhD students supervised by Professor Li on AI-driven NLP in the Department of EEE, and Dr. Lawrence Cheung, Associate Professor in Linguistics at CUHK.

“We are particularly thrilled that this award is granted by Facebook, the international leader in AI research.  This award is recognition of the outstanding achievement of HKU and HKU Engineering in AI research. As the leader in AI to advance well-being and society, we are confident that HKU would continue to support us, as this competitive research theme will substantially strengthen the competitiveness of HKU and HK.” Professor Li said.

Recently, Professor Victor OK Li, Dr. Jacqueline CK Lam and Professor Yu-Lung Lau have been selected to lead the Strategic Oriented Research Theme on “AI to Advance Well-being and Society”. Their vision is to develop socially beneficial AI technologies that advance well-being and society, taking into account ethical and moral considerations. Guided by this vision, the HKU AI team will blaze a path on AI-driven, evidence-based, societal-empowering research benefitting citizens in Hong Kong and beyond.

Media enquiry:
Faculty of Engineering:
Ms Rhea Leung (Tel: 3917-8519/ 9022-7446; Email: rhea.leung@hku.hk)

Communication and Public Affairs Office:
Ms Trinni Choy (Tel: 2859 2606/ Email: pychoy@hku.hk)
Ms Rashida Suffiad (Tel: 2857 8555/ email: rsuffiad@hku.hk)