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Prof. MENG, Mei Ling Helen 蒙 美 玲 教授

Prof. MENG, Mei Ling Helen 蒙 美 玲 教授

Patrick Huen Wing Ming Professor of Systems Engineering & Engineering Management

SB,SM,PhD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

 

Research Interests :
* Big Data Decision Analytics
* Multilingual Speech and Language Processing
* Multibiometric Authentication
* Multimedia Content Retrieval
* Multimodal Human-Computer Interactions

Office: Room 607, William M.W. Mong Engineering Building
Tel: 3943-8327
Email: hmmeng@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Biography

Helen Meng is Patrick Huen Wing Ming Professor of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received the S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees, all in Electrical Engineering from MIT. She joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1998, and established the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory in her department in 1999. In 2005, she founded the Microsoft-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Human-Centric Computing and Interface Technologies and serves as Director. This laboratory has been recognized as a Ministry of Education (MoE) of China Key Laboratory since 2008. In 2006, she founded the Tsinghua-CUHK Joint Research Centre for Media Sciences, Technologies and Systems. In 2007, she helped establish the Laboratory for Ambient Intelligence and Multimodal Systems in the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, through its joint initiative with CUHK. In 2013, she established the CUHK Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics Research Center and serves as its Founding Director. Helen served as Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Engineering between 2006 and 2010, as well as Department Chairman between 2012 and 2018.

Professor Meng is a recognized scholar in the field of multilingual speech and language processing, multimodal human-computer interaction and Big Data analytics. She leads the interdisciplinary research team that received the first Theme-based Research Scheme Project in Artificial Intelligence in 2019. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 2013 “for contributions to spoken language and multimodal systems”; a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (one of 62 worldwide, 8 from Asia), elected in 2016 “for contributions to multilingual, multimodal human-computer interaction and language learning technologies”; and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) and Hong Kong Computer Society (HKCS). Her recent awards include 2018 CogInfoComm Best Paper Award, 2017 Outstanding Women Professional Award (one of 20 since 1999), 2016 Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (one of 32 academics worldwide), 2016 IBM Faculty Award, 2016 IEEE ICME Best Paper Award, 2015 ISCA Distinguished Lecturer, 2015 HKCS inaugural Outstanding ICT Women Professional Award and 2012 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) inaugural Distinguished Lecturer. Prior to that, she has also received such awards as the CUHK Faculty of Engineering Exemplary Teaching Award, Young Researcher Award and Service Award; APSIPA Best Oral Paper Award, and 2009 Ministry of Education Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award in Technological Advancements. She has delivered numerous invited and keynote talks, such as IEEE SIDAS 2016, ASTRI-HPE Conference 2016, Internet Economy Summit 2017, GMIC 2017, INTERSPEECH 2018 Plenary, SIGDIAL 2019 Keynote, etc.

Professor Meng devotes much effort towards professional services both regionally and internationally. She was elected Editor-in-Chief (2009-2011) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s (SPS) Transaction on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (often regarded as the most prestigious journal in the field), IEEE SPS Board of Governors (2014-2016), and currently serves on the Nominations and Appointments Committee (2017-2018). Helen was also an elected member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Board (2007-2015) and current serves on its International Advisory Council (2017-2020). She was Technical Chair of ISCA’s flagship conference INTERSPEECH 2014 and will be General Chair of INTERSPEECH 2020. Helen was twice elected Chairperson of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (2015-2016, 2017-2018). She has also been invited to serve in various research funding agencies, including the evaluation and monitoring review panel of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s National Centres of Competence in Research. Locally, Helen has held HKSAR Government appointments such as Member of the Steering Committee in eHealth Record Sharing, Hong Kong-Guangdong ICT Expert Committee and Working Group Coordinator for Big Data Research and Applications, Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund Council, The Open University of Hong Kong Council, and former member of the Digital 21 Strategy Advisory Committee and Hong Kong Productivity Council. She has served a five-year term in the HKIE Accreditation Committee for Computer Science Programs, chaired a judging panel of the annual CoolThink@JC Competition (since 2017) that enhances primary school students’ awareness and interests on computational thinking through coding and problem solving and served as Chairlady of the Working Party on Manpower Survey of the Information Technology Sector (2013-2014, 2015-2016, 2017-2018). She is currently serving as Chairman of the Research Grants Council’s Assessment Panel for Competitive Research Funding Schemes for the Local Self-financing Degree Sector. She is the recipient of the 2019 IEEE Leo L. Beranek Meritorious Service Award for “for exemplary service to and leadership in the Signal Processing Society”.

 

Selected Publications

Lifa Sun, Kun Li, Hao Wang, Shiyin Kang and Helen Meng, “Phonetic Posteriorgrams for Many-to-one Voice Conversion without Parallel Data Training”, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2016. (Best Paper Award)

Hao Wang, Peggy Mok and Helen Meng, “Capitalizing on Musical Rhythm for Prosodic Training in Computer-Aided Language Learning”, Computer Speech and Language, 2016.

Quanjie Yu, Peng Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Shiyin Kang, Helen Meng, Lianhong Cai, “Learning Cross-lingual Information with Multilingual BLSTM for Speech Synthesis of Low-resource Languages”, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2016.

Yaodong Tang, Yuchen Huang, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng, Mingxing Xu, Lianhong Cai, “Question Detection from Acoustic Features using Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Recurrent Unit”, Proc. IEEE ICASSP 2016.

Xinyu Lan, Xu Li, Yishuang Ning, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng, Jia Jia, Lianhong Cai, “Low Level Descriptors based DBLSTM Bottleneck Feature for Speech Driven Talking Avatar”, Proc. IEEE ICASSP 2016.

Ka Ho Wong, Wing Sum Yeung, Yu Ting Yeung and Helen Meng, “Exploring Articulatory Characteristics of Cantonese Dysarthric Speech Using Distinctive Features”, Proc. IEEE ICASSP 2016.

Pengfei Liu, Shoaib Jameel, King Keung Wu, and Helen Meng, “Learning Track Representation and Trends for Conference Analytics”, Proc. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2016.

Xiaojun Qian, Helen Meng and Frank Soong, “A Two-Pass Framework of Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis for Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 2016.

Zhen-Hua Ling, Shiyin Kang, Heiga Zen, Andrew W. Senior, Mike Schuster, Xiaojun Qian, Helen M. Meng, Li Deng, “Deep Learning for Acoustic Modeling in Parametric Speech Generation: A systematic review of existing techniques and future trends”, IEEE Signal Process. Magazine 2015.

HH Chan, KL Wong, YH Kuo, JMY Leung and H Meng, “Real-Time Optimization for Disaster Response: A Mathematical Programming Approach”. International Journal of Big Data, 2015.

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, CUHK