Director

Prof. Hui Xiong
Director, HKUST (Guangzhou) Algorithmic Contest Association

Prof. Hui Xiong has received multiple honors and professional recognitions, including Changjiang Scholar Chair Professor and NSFC Distinguished Young Scholar (Overseas). He is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE, AAAI, and CAAI, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. In 2024, he founded Nature npj | AI and serves as the Founding Editor-in-Chief. He has led major national research projects and has published 400+ papers in artificial intelligence and data mining, with 60,000+ citations and an h-index of 100. He is listed among the World’s Top 2% Scientists (annual and career impact). His awards include the ACM SIGKDD Service Award, the AAAI Best Paper Award, the IEEE ICDM Distinguished Service Award, the IEEE ICDM Best Paper Award, and the Ram Charan Management Practice Award (Grand Prize) from Harvard Business Review.

Faculty Advisor

Prof. Ying Sun
Assistant Professor, AI Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou)

Prof. Ying Sun’s research focuses on interpretable artificial intelligence, data mining, and related interdisciplinary applications. In the past five years, she has published 40+ papers in venues including Nature Communications, Nature Cities, IEEE TKDE, KDD, and NeurIPS, and has filed 10+ patents. She has led multiple research projects funded at national, provincial, and city levels, and her research outcomes have been reported by major media outlets. She has served on program committees for top international conferences such as KDD, ICLR, AAAI, and IJCAI, and holds community service roles in related research areas.