Bulletin No. 2, 2023

One of the research projects of CPII, led by Professor Meng, aims to help individuals with speech impairments due to neuromotor disorders by using AI to reconstruct their disordered speech. This allows them to ease their communication with caretakers, family and friends, and thus enhance social inclusion for the individual. Their technology for disordered speech reconstruction was awarded first prize at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park’s SciTech Challenge in 2021. Another of Professor Meng’s research projects at CPII concerns conversational AI. Her team participated in DialDoc@ACL in 2022, an international challenge that encourages the building of open-domain document- grounded question-answering systems (a technology similar to chatbots). The system developed by the Centre ultimately received top prize from the Challenge’s organisers, further demonstrating the progress the CPII has made since its founding. The subsequent emergence of further chatbots such as ChatGPT in late 2022 has aroused global interest in their great potential, and it has also opened up new opportunities for the CPII, spurring the team to further research such technologies. Professor Meng is eager to have even more people benefit from its continuing research into AI. “The applicability of the CPII’s results in R&D is not confined to any particular sector or geography,” she says. So what next for the centre? Recently, a collaborative project between Professor Meng’s team and Vietnam’s VinUniversity received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Grand Challenges 2023 initiative. This year’s theme is to catalyse the use of equitable AI to support low-and middle-income countries, and the collaboration between CPII and VinUniversity aimed to develop generative AI technologies for gynecological healthcare in Vietnam. In this and many aspects, the professor notes, the burgeoning field of AI in Hong Kong, along with CUHK’s continuing support, bodes well for further digital transformation and technological equity for the future of Hong Kong and beyond. Our hope is to develop AI technologies to advance technological equity. We stand ready to adapt our technologies to directly benefit users with our own cultural backgrounds and usages in our cultural contexts. Professor Helen Meng Director, Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence “ ” How AI and robotics reshape the world 17 An intelligent vision for health