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Contact Info

Associate Professor
Department of Computing
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Kowloon, HONG KONG
 Office:
Phone:
Fax:
Email:
 PQ826
+852 2766-7279
+852 2215-4652
csgngai _at_ comp.polyu.edu.hk

Background

Welcome to my home page!

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. Prior to that, I studied engineering at Brown University, where I got my Sc.B.. Oh, and I also got my M.S.E. (Masters of Science in Engineering) at JHU along the way to getting my Ph.D..

My research interests are in human-computer interaction and natural language processing.

I have served as reviewer and on the program committee for several journals and conferences including IEEE TSMC-B, CL, CLCLP, ACL, COLING, EMNLP and IJCAI. I co-chaired the COLING-2002 Semanet Workshop and was area chair for the Entity Extraction Track for EMNLP 2006. Within the department, I am one of the faculty-in-charge of the E-Toy Lab, and a member of the Chinese Computing Lab.

Teaching

Courses I'm teaching this year:

A bit of bragging rights: I have been awarded the University's President Award in Teaching (Individual), 2009-10!

I was the recipient of the Faculty of Engineering's Individual Merit Award in Teaching for the 2005-06 and 2007-08 academic years, and the Outstanding Award in Teaching for the 2009-10 academic year. Together with my colleagues Drs. Stephen Chan and Vincent Ng, we were awarded the Faculty of Engineering's Team Outstanding Award in Teaching for 2006-07; as a team with some other colleagues, we were awarded the University's President Award in Services for 2007-08.

I am a strong proponent of community work and service learning, and I am one of the coordinators of our department's Community Outreach Merit Program (COMP). The goal of COMP is to facilitate and encourage students in using their IT and computing skills to serve the community. Projects that we have organized include the Creative Robot Programming Camps, the Hubei English and IT Camps, the Gansu IT Service Learning Tour and the Cambodia IT Service Learning Tour.

Research

I am one of the co-authors of the fnTBL toolkit for fast transformation-based learning.

Personal

  • Countries I've visited (43 to date!):
    Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Laos, Libya, Malaysia, Monaco, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Philipines, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, US, UK, Vatican City, Vietnam Map of visited countries

    Generate your own map at World66
  • My little menagerie now consists of: Cheetah the Cat, who returned from the US with me; Woofy the wacko retriever; Bayes and Markov the leopard geckos.

Some Interesting Links