Prof. Tim Kwang-Ting CHENG, Prof. Jiaya JIA and Prof. Ke YI Elected as Association for Computing Machinery Fellows 2025 for Outstanding Research Achievements in Computer Science

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Tim Kwang-Ting CHENG (Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering), Prof. Jiaya JIA (Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering) & Prof. Ke YI (Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering) have been selected as the ACM Fellows 2025 for Outstanding Research Achievements in Computer Science.

About Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

ACM brings together computing educators, researchers, and professionals to foster dialogue, share resources, and address relevant concerns. As the world's largest computer association, ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice by providing strong leadership, advocating for the highest standards, and recognising technical brilliance. ACM promotes professional progress by offering chances for lifelong learning, career advancement, and networking.

Founded at the dawn of the computer age, ACM's reach spans the globe, with more than half of its more than 100,000 members residing outside the United States. Its rising membership has resulted in Councils in Europe, India, and China, which encourage networking opportunities and build links between countries and technical communities. Their initiatives help ACM promote awareness of computing's critical technical, educational, and social challenges around the world.

Outstanding Achievements of our Professors

Prof. Tim CHENG is a recognised expert in electronic design automation and software-hardware co-design for computer chips and systems. He has great expertise facilitating cross-disciplinary research collaborations and has made substantial contributions to computer vision and medical image analysis. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, and the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. His influential work has earned him numerous awards, including the ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award, the China Computer Federation Award for Overseas Outstanding Contribution, the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation Award for Outstanding Research, and more than a dozen best paper awards from major conferences and journals. In addition, he has successfully commercialised some of his inventions.

Prof. CHENG is deeply honoured to be elected as an ACM Fellow. He stated, "This recognition is a testament to my team’s efforts in electronic design automation and software-hardware co-design of electronic circuits and computing systems over the years. We will continue to promote interdisciplinary research collaborations and advance the development of electronic design automation and software-hardware co-design for AI computing chips."

Prof. Jiaya JIA, an IEEE Fellow, specialises in computer vision, language, and deep learning. His research interests include image and video reasoning, VLMs, multimodal AI, and generative approaches. His publications have been cited over 100,000 times on Google Scholar, with an H-index more than 120. Prof. JIA has won various accolades, including the SIGGRAPH Asia Test-of-Time Award in 2023 and 2024 and the NPAR Best Paper Award in 2012. Stanford University has repeatedly designated him one of the world's top 2% most-cited scientists. Prof. JIA is also the founder of SmartMore, a unicorn dedicated to driving global Industry 4.0 through intelligent technology, products, and solutions.

Prof. JIA stated, "This honour will inspire us to continue our efforts in applying computer vision and deep learning to real-world scenarios. I sincerely appreciate the unwavering support we have received from HKUST and our partners over the years. We will continue to drive innovation, inject new momentum into the development of artificial intelligence (AI), and make contributions to society."

Prof. Ke YI is a highly regarded researcher in data management and theoretical computer science, whose research interests include database theory and systems, query processing, data security and privacy, parallel and distributed algorithms, and data streams. His work emphasises the importance of theory and practice in developing effective, practical algorithms. Prof. YI has written around 160 papers in international conferences and publications, receiving various awards throughout his career. These include two SIGMOD Best Paper Awards, four SIGMOD Research Highlight Awards, a PODS Test-of-Time Award, a SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award, and a Google Faculty Research Award. He also served as the program chair for Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) 2026 and International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) 2021 and has been the chair of the SIGMOD Research Highlight Committee since 2025.

Prof. YI expressed his gratitude to ACM for the recognition and emphasized, "My team has always been dedicated to creating algorithms that are both theoretically robust and practically impactful. Moving forward, we aim to explore these areas even further, contributing to the advancement and prosperity of computer science."

We congratulate Prof. CHENG, Prof. JIA and Prof. YI on their great performance and look forward to their future efforts to ACM.

Prof. Tim Kwang-Ting CHENG, Prof. Jiaya JIA and Prof. Ke YI