Professor Yan Hong is currently Chair Professor of Computer Engineering of the Department of Electrical Engineering of City University of Hong Kong (CityU). He received a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University, the United States (US). He was previously Professor of Imaging Science in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Professor Yan’s research interests include image processing, pattern recognition and bioinformatics. His research group analyses video data from cell division to study gene functions. It has also conducted extensive research on drug resistance in non-small-cell lung cancer targeted therapy. Professor Yan is now leading a collaborative research project on tensor computing. His team has developed tensor theories and computational methods for image matching, motor vehicle tracking, human facial expression recognition, co-clustering, and biomedical data analysis. In addition, it has designed application-specific electronic circuits for tensor parallel computing.
Professor Yan was listed among the top 2% of the world’s most highly cited scientists, according to metrics compiled by Stanford University in 2020 and 2021. He received a Silver Medal at Inventions Geneva Evaluation Days 2022, the “Best Mobile Entertainment Software Award” in the third Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Excellence Awards, and the 2016 “Norbert Wiener Award” from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. The real-time lip synchronisation and facial animation system, document imaging, and printed and handwritten character-recognition systems developed by his group have been licensed to several information technology and communications companies. Professor Yan is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and US’s IEEE. He was also elected a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2019, and a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors in 2021.