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Wency Chen

Yang Hongxia, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) scientist who did stints with Alibaba Group Holding and TikTok owner ByteDance, has joined the faculty of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Yang is a professor in PolyU’s Department of Computing, where she is recruiting doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers interested in “specialising in generative AI and decentralised computing”, according to her profile on the university website.
Yang did not respond immediately to a request for an interview on Monday.
The move aligns with the government’s ongoing efforts to transform the city into a technology hub.
“Despite its small geographical size, Hong Kong is an international city that can attract talent and access global markets,” Albert Wong Hak-keung, CEO of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, said in a recent interview with the Post. “Additionally, the city has strong fundamental research capabilities, underpinned by its top universities.”
As one of China’s most notable female figures working in AI, Yang joined ByteDance’s applied machine learning team in 2023. She was based in Seattle, where she reported to Liang Xiang, who headed development of the Doubao large language model. Yang left ByteDance in May to start her own AI-related project, according to Chinese tech news outlet 36Kr.

Before her tenure at ByteDance, Yang worked at Alibaba’s Damo Academy, which she joined in 2013. She played a pivotal role in the development of the 10-trillion-parameter M6 multimodal model, which is considered the predecessor to Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen model. Alibaba owns the Post.
Her other positions include working as a researcher at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center and principal scientist at Yahoo!, as well as an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University’s Shanghai Advanced Research Institute.
Yang earned a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Nankai University in Tianjin, a port city in northern China, and her PhD from Duke University in North Carolina. She has authored more than 100 papers for top-tier conferences and journals, and holds more than 50 patents in the US and China.
Chinese tech giants have seen a number of their AI professionals returning to academia or joining China’s burgeoning AI start-up scene, as the nation races to catch-up with the US.
Earlier this month, Zhou Chang, a former Alibaba algorithm engineer, left the company to start his own AI-focused business. Similarly, Jia Yangqing, who previously led the computing platform department at Alibaba Cloud, left last year to found the AI infrastructure start-up LeptonAI.


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China’s top AI scientist Yang Hongxia joins Hong Kong Polytechnic University

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Yang Hongxia, a leading artificial intelligence scientist, has joined PolyU. Photo: PolyU

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Big Tech

The recruitment comes as the Hong Kong government makes efforts to transform the city into a technology hub by leveraging the research capabilities of its top universities


The recruitment comes as the Hong Kong government makes efforts to transform the city into a technology hub by leveraging the research capabilities of its top universities.
