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Education

Ph.D., Computer Science
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology
M.S., Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara
Cert. Ed. (Distinction)
University of Hong Kong
B.S., Electrical Engineering
University of Hong Kong


Professional Services

  1. Associate Editor / Editorial Board Member
    Speech Communication (2005 - present)
    IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2009 - 2012)
    IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2006 - 2008)
  2. Member of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee of IEEE's Signal Processing Society (2006 - 2008)
  3. General Co-chair: ISCSLP 2020
  4. Area Chair: Interspeech 2020|2014, ICASSP 2007
  5. Technical Program Co-chair: ISCSLP 2012|2010
  6. Panel and Invited Speaker Co-chair: IEEE SLT 2020
  7. Chairman of the IEEE Hong Kong Chapter of Signal Processing (2009 - 2010)
  8. Member of the Expert Review Panel of the Logistics and Supply Chain MultiTech R&D Centre (LSCM), Hong Kong SAR (since 2019)


Awards

  1. Best Paper Award (2004) in the area of Speech Processing from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2004. The awarded paper is co-authored with Dr. Enrico Bocchieri and its citation is: E. Bocchieri and B. Mak, "Subspace distribution clustering hidden Markov model," IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 9(3):264-275, March 2001.

  2. Best Student Paper Award (2012) from the 8th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), for the paper titled “Speaker-Ensemble Hidden Markov Modeling For Automatic Speech Recognition,” which is co-authored with his PhD student, Mr. Guoli Ye.

  3. Special Mention, Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching (2019) from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

  4. Teaching Award (2018, 2000) from the School of Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for "Teaching Excellence Appreciation" in 2000 and 2018.

  5. Best Ten Lecturers (2006). The annual election of the "Best Ten Lecturers" was organized by the student union, VERTEX, of House II (one of the UG Halls) of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

  6. Teaching Innovation Award (2007). A member of one of the five teaching teams that were honored by HKUST with Teaching Innovation Awards for successfully introducing new ideas, techniques and practices in teaching.

  7. HKUST President's Cup Winner (2019). The HKUST President's Cup is an annual event for undergraduate students of the University to compete for the awards based on outstanding achievements in research and innovation. The project titled "Helen - An Accessibility Device for AI-based Lip Reading," won the Cup in 2015. It was done by two year-two undergraduate CSE students, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy and Amrutavarsh Sanganabasappa Kinagi under my supervision. (The project also won the IET Present Around The World (PATW) Competition 2019 final.)

  8. HKUST President's Cup Winner (2015). The project titled "Turn any Computer Screen into Gesture-Assisted Touch Screen using a Leap Motion Controller," won the Cup in 2015. It was done by two undergraduate CSE students, LEVIERO and Andrianto LI under my supervision.

  9. HKUST President's Cup Gold Award (2016). The winning team supervised by me consists of 4 undergraduate students: LEUNG Ka Chun, CHEUNG Yat Laam, TO Wun Yin, and TAM Chi Yan. And the project title is "Using the Leap Motion Controller To Translate Sign Language To Speech."

  10. One of the HKUST President's Cup Finalists (2017). The team supervised by me consists of 4 undergraduate students: GUPTA Akanksha, ARSHAD Mohammed Arslan, FESCI Onur, and BORAR Sheetal. And the project title is "Text-to-Sign: English Text to American Sign Language."