Dr Liu Ye Honoured with PolyU PhD Thesis Award 2026 - Outstanding Award

We are proud to announce that our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr LIU Ye, has been conferred the PolyU PhD Thesis Award 2026 – Outstanding Award (STEM Category) in recognition of his contribution to multi-modal understanding and agentic AI through his novel graduating thesis.

Established by the PolyU Graduate School, the PhD Thesis Award recognises, rewards, and promotes the distinguished research achievements of graduating PhD students, with the "Outstanding Award" representing the highest level of recognition.

Thesis Title: Towards Interactive Multi-modal Content Understanding

Chief Supervisor: Professor CHEN Changwen, Interim Dean of the Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Chair Professor of Visual Computing

The thesis advances the transition from conversational AI to agentic AI: intelligent systems that can understand their surroundings, make informed decisions and take action. It develops a framework connecting perception, reasoning and interaction, enabling AI to actively seek information and use what it learns to guide its next step. This brings society closer to AI assistants that can handle unfamiliar situations and help people accomplish complex tasks. The research provides foundations for more capable and efficient AI, with technologies already adopted in products from Tencent, vivo and Huawei. Its openly shared models, software and datasets also support innovation across the research community and industry. Looking ahead, these advances could enable assistants that operate digital tools and robots that interact with the physical world. By connecting understanding with purposeful action, this work contributes to a future in which AI plays a more useful role in how people work, learn and live.