Dr. May Fung Selected for the AAAI 2026 New Faculty Highlights (NFH) Program

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Yi R. (May) Fung from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has been selected for the AAAI 2026 New Faculty Highlights (NFH) program.

About AAAI New Faculty Highlights

The AAAI New Faculty Highlights program, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), recognizes early-career faculty members worldwide who have made significant contributions to AI research and show exceptional promise for future impact. This prestigious acknowledgment places Dr. Fung among the most promising new voices in the global AI research community.

Research Overview

Dr. Fung's research focuses on scaling trustworthy and human-centric foundation models through advanced reasoning and agentic AI frameworks. Her recent work proposes a unified paradigm of active multimodal knowledge grounding—where AI systems actively engage in deeper text-visual interleaved thinking; seek out, gather, and verify information from dynamic environments; and adapt their actions and resource use based on problem difficulty and user steering, rather than passively relying on static data or trained capabilities. In particular, this approach is built upon the following three key pillars:

1. First, she led a team of PhD student researchers to define the emerging Thinking with Images paradigm through a 36 page comprehensive survey that covers the methodological shift of multimodal models from text-centric chain-of-thought to interleaved text+visual reasoning (e.g., interactive visual scratchpad and beyond) which better tackles challenging problem domains spanning STEM, embodied AI, creative tasks, and beyond.
2. Building on this foundation of advanced reasoning, her team presents WebWatcher, a vision-language deep research agent that performs multi-step evidence gathering and verification from complex web content in further bridging the gap towards human-like research workflows.
3. Finally, to ensure these capable systems can be effectively and safely steered, she and her students propose the AdaCtrl framework, an adaptive control mechanism that aligns AI behavior with user preferences and task difficulty, optimizing computational resources for reliable and transparent human-AI collaboration.

Together, these contributions aim to create more capable, context-aware, and steerable AI partners that can safely support scientific, educational, and social applications.

Reflection from Dr. Fung

"Being selected for the AAAI New Faculty Highlights is a tremendous honor. It reflects not only the hard work of my wonderful research group and collaborators, but also the growing importance of building AI systems that are trustworthy, adaptable, and aligned with human needs. This recognition motivates me to continue pushing the boundaries of AI reasoning and human-AI collaboration, and I look forward to further exploring how these technologies can contribute to healthier and more intelligent information ecosystems."

We congratulate Dr. Fung on this outstanding achievement and look forward to her continued contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.

For more information, please visit: https://mayrfung.github.io/

Dr. May Fung has been selected for the AAAI 2026 New Faculty Highlights (NFH) program.

The AAAI New Faculty Highlights program is organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).