Academic Staff

Lin Du is an Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Scholar) with a joint appointment in the Department of Chinese History and Culture (CHC) and the Division of Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities (AIH) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Her research connects visual history and artificial intelligence through the cultural archive: as evidence of how images circulate and acquire meaning, as a testbed for evaluating multimodal models, and as a foundation for new forms of narrative simulation and visual creation. Grounded in the visual and media histories of China and the interconnected worlds of East and Southeast Asia, she combines computer vision, archival research, and digital historical forensics to reconstruct relationships among images, texts, and metadata. Building on this work, she develops expert-verified benchmarks and evaluation methods for multimodal AI, examining visual evidence, provenance, text-image conflict, uncertainty, and culturally grounded reasoning. She further extends archival interpretation into generative and agentic AI through historically grounded narrative simulation, human–AI creativity, and animation. She welcomes collaborations on culturally grounded evaluation and benchmarking, multimodal reasoning, provenance-aware retrieval, agentic narrative systems, and AI-assisted visual storytelling.

Before joining PolyU, she was an Assistant Professor and, previously, a Postdoctoral Fellow, both jointly appointed in the Departments of Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. She received her Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from the University of California, Los Angeles. She also holds an M.A. in Regional Studies: East Asia from Harvard University and a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Peking University. She is completing an M.S. in Data Science at The University of Texas at Austin.

Her research has been published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, with additional work accepted by Asia Pacific Perspectives. Her research and digital heritage projects have received grants and awards from the ACLS, Singapore National Heritage Board, AI Singapore, and Nagoya University. In 2025, she led a team that won First Place in the Public Sector Track of the AI Singapore Pan-Southeast Asia AI Developer Challenge.

2025-2027

Master of Science in Data Science, The University of Texas at Austin Expected completion: 2027

2024

Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles

Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles

2016

Master of Arts in Regional Studies: East Asia, Harvard University Concentration in the art history of China and Japan

2011

Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University

2010

Visiting Student, School of Letters, NUPACE Program, Nagoya University

Academic Appointments

• August 2026-Present

Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Scholar)

Joint appointment in the Department of Chinese History and Culture and the Division of Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• July 2025-August 2026

Assistant Professor

Joint appointment in the Departments of Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies

National University of Singapore

• 2024-2025

Postdoctoral Fellow

Joint appointment in the Departments of Japanese Studies and Chinese Studies

National University of Singapore

Selected Museum Experience

• 2017

Curatorial Intern, Japan Society Gallery, New York

• 2016

Intern, International Program

The Museum of Modern Art, New York