Keynote Lectures

Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich and affiliate of its Computer Science Department. Furthermore, he is member of the external faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. 

In January 2014, Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Shortly later, he was also affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft for some years, where he led the PhD school in “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”. 

Dirk Helbing started as a physicist. With his diploma thesis, he initiated the area of pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. During his PhD and habilitation in physics, he helped to establish the fields of socio-, econo- and traffic physics. He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG). 

The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of media reports and publications, among them more than 10 papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS), the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative (external page www.futurict.eu), he helped to establish data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science.

Pascale Fung is a Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her "significant contributions to the field of conversational AI and to the development of ethical AI principles and algorithms", an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is an Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research centre promoting human-centric AI. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. She was a Distinguished Consultant on Responsible AI at Meta in 2022, and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google in 2023. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.

Prof. Fung was born in Shanghai to professional artist parents but found her calling in artificial intelligence when she became interested in science fiction as a child. Today, her research interest lies in building frontier AI models that benefit humans and society and in understanding the emerging capabilities and limitations of such models in order to render them more controllable and trustworthy. She was a past Editor and Associate Editor for Computer Speech and Language, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Transactions for ACL, IEEE Signal Processing Letters. She served as a Committee Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technology Committee (SLTC) for six years. She is a past president t and a Board Member of the ACL Special Interest Group on Linguistics Data and Corpus Based Approaches in NLP (SIGDAT).

Prof. Fung received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1997. She worked and studied at AT&T Bell Labs, BBN Systems & Technologies, LIMSI, CNRS, France,Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Japan, and at Ecole Centrale Paris, France. She speaks seven European and Asian languages.