HKUST's ideal research environment is situated in beautiful Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong.
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Dekai Wu (De Kai)

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST
Distinguished Research Scholar, ICSI, Berkeley

Human Language Technology Center
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
HKUST, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
tel +852 2358-6989 · fax +852 2358-1477 · room 3556 (lifts 25-30)
lab +852 2358-8831 · room 2602 (lifts 27-30)
dekai@cs.ust.hk · http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai

 

link to COVID-19 project
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videos + articles + interactive simulation

 

SCMP
Debretts

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) prior to joining HKUST in its founding year in 1992. Other degrees include an Executive MBA from Kellogg (Northwestern University) and HKUST in 2002, and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California at San Diego (Revelle College departmental award, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1984. I have been a visiting researcher at Columbia University in 1995-96, Bell Laboratories in 1995, and the Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany) during 1986-87.

In December 2011, I was selected by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of only 17 scientists worldwide to be awarded the honor of founding ACL Fellow, with a citation for "significant contributions to machine translation and the development of inversion transduction grammar" which pioneered the integration of syntactic and semantic models into statistical machine translation paradigms.

I have served as Associate Editor of Computer Speech and Language, AI Journal, and ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, and Journal of Natural Language Engineering. I also served as Chair of IWSLT 2019, Area Co-Chair for ICLR 2020, ACL 2019, EMNLP 2016, NAACL HLT 2016, IJCAI 2015, ACL 2013, and IJCNLP 2013, Chair of IWSLT 2012, Co-Chair for EMNLP-2004, and the Organizing Committee of ACL-2000 and WVLC-5 (SIGDAT 1997), as well as the Executive Committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). In 2007 I initiated the ongoing annual SSST workshop series on Syntax, Semantics, and Structure in Statistical Translation.

South China Morning Post has a nice overview of my accomplishments, activities, and approaches. In 2015 Debrett's named me as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong, in the area of science.

In 2019, Google named me as one of eight inaugural members of its AI Ethics council, ATEAC (Advanced Technology External Advisory Council).

Research interests

Artificial intelligence; human language and music technology; computational linguistics; natural language processing; machine translation; machine learning; neural networks; data science; cognitive models of human language and communication; multilingual computing; language modeling; speech recognition; language acquisition; dialog systems; information retrieval; knowledge management; evolution of language and music; computational musicology; computer music.

For machine learning of the relationships between musical languages, we received the ICMC Best Presentation Award from the International Computer Music Association in 2015.

For machine learning of the relationships between written and spoken languages, milestone successes pioneered by my statistical machine translation (SMT) research group include:

Our active research projects are internationally funded by the US DARPA BOLT, GALE, and LORELEI programs, the European Union EU-BRIDGE project, and the Hong Kong RGC.

Human Language Technology Center (HLTC)

Activities

Teaching

Current/recent research students

Selected publications

2024.01.22
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