AI and Systems Design for Marine Challenges

Speaker: Prof. Sai-Kit YEUNG
Professor
Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
Department of Ocean Science (OCES)

Title: AI and Systems Design for Marine Challenges

Date: Monday, 30 March 2026

Time: 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater F
(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater), near lift 25/26, HKUST

Abstract:

In this talk, I will explore the pivotal role of AI in tackling the challenges of visual understanding in the marine environment. In particular, I will introduce the concept of marine AI foundation models—large-scale pre-trained systems designed for marine visual understanding. These models aim to capture the unique characteristics of underwater environments and serve as a universal system for various visual understanding tasks, such as coral reef monitoring, biodiversity assessment, marine species monitoring, and underwater navigation. Additionally, I will discuss several ongoing projects focused on achieving accurate underwater 3D mapping. The research I will present contributes to interdisciplinary efforts across maritime planning, large-scale seafloor surveying and cleaning, fishery management, marine life monitoring, underwater trash cleaning, and advancing AI applications in marine science and technology.

Biography:

Sai-Kit Yeung is a Professor at the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD), the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Department of Ocean Science (OCES) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST, he was an Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and founded the Vision, Graphics and Computational Design (VGD) Group. During his time at SUTD, he was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Prior to that, he had been a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Prof. Yeung’s research interests include 3D vision and graphics, content generation, fabrication, novel computational techniques and integrative systems for marine-related problems. He has published extensively in premier computer vision and graphics venues, including numerous full oral papers in CVPR, ICCV, and AAAI. His work has received best paper honorable mention awards at ICCP 2015 and 3DV 2016. Prof. Yeung has been actively serving as a senior committee member in major AI, computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics conferences. These include roles as a Senior Program Committee member for IJCAI 2021 and AAAI 2021 and 2022, an Area Chair for ICCV 2023, CVPR 2023, 2024, and 2025, NeurIPS 2024, and ICML 2025, 2026, ECCV 2026, as well as a Lead Area Chair for CVPR 2026. He also serves as an Associate Editor (Robot Learning) for ICRA 2024, 2025, and 2026. He was Course Chair for SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 and regularly contributes as a Technical Papers Committee member for Eurographics, SIGGRAPH, and SIGGRAPH Asia. He is currently an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).