Academic Staff

Prof. YANG Hongxia

Executive Director of PAAI (EDoPAAI), Associate Dean (Global Engagement) of Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Professor, Director of UBDA

BS (Nankai); PhD (Duke)

PolyU Scholars Hub

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Biography

Prof. Hongxia Yang, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Executive Director of the PolyU Academy for AI (PAAI), is a Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her PhD from Duke University, has published over 150 papers in leading conferences and journals, and holds more than 50 patents. She has received numerous prestigious awards, including the highest honor of the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) — the Super AI Leader (SAIL) Award, the Second Prize of the 2020 National Science and Technology Progress Award, the First Prize of the Chinese Institute of Electronics Science and Technology Progress Award in 2021, and both the Forbes China Top 50 Women in Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education Science and Technology Progress Award (First Class) in 2022. Since 2023, she has been recognized as an AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar and was named one of the Top 50 Women in AI worldwide by CoinDesk, as well as a WAIC SAIL Top 30 Projects honoree in 2025.

Her professional experience spans leading roles across academia and industry: she served as Head of LLM in the US at ByteDance, AI Scientist and Director at Alibaba Group, Principal Data Scientist at Yahoo! Inc., and Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She has also held joint adjunct professorships at Zhejiang University and the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute. Notably, she founded the foundation model teams at both Alibaba and ByteDance, establishing herself as a pioneer in the field of Generative AI.

Education and Academic Qualifications

Bachelor of Science, Nankai University
Doctor of Philosophy, Duke University