Donor
Vobile Group
Appointee
Professor Yang Hongxia
Prof. Yang Hongxia, Associate Dean (Global Engagement) of the Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences and Executive Director of the PolyU Academy for Artificial Intelligence (PAAI) , is Chair Professor of Generative Artificial Intelligence 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 honour 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 recognised 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 honouree in 2025.
Her professional experience spans leading roles across academia and industry. She has served as Head of Large Language Models in the US at ByteDance, AI Scientist and Director at the 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.
