Professor Meng, Mei Ling Helen

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).

Areas of expertise: Big data decision analytics, multilingual speech and language processing, multibiometric authentication, multimedia content retrieval, multimodal human-computer interactions.

Brief biography

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.

Awards

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
2012 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) inaugural Distinguished Lecturer
CUHK Faculty of Engineering Exemplary Teaching Award
Young Researcher Award and Service Award
APSIPA Best Oral Paper Award
2009 Ministry of Education Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award in Technological Advancements. 

Selected publications

1. 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)
2. Hao Wang, Peggy Mok and Helen Meng, “Capitalizing on Musical Rhythm for Prosodic Training in Computer-Aided Language Learning”, Computer Speech and Language, 2016.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.