Yuanzhe Wang, PhD, is a Professor and PhD supervisor at the School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and previously served as a Research Assistant Professor at NTU.

Wenqi Ren, PhD, is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Deputy Director of the MOE Key Laboratory of Information Technology, and recipient of the National Excellent Young Scientist Fund. He earned his PhD from Tianjin University & University of California, Merced (joint program) and previously worked at the Institute of Information Engineering, CAS. His research focuses on computer vision and AI safety. He has led multiple national projects (e.g., NSFC key/joint projects) and collaborations with Huawei, Tencent, etc.

Dr. Han Xiaoguang is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on computer graphics and 3D vision, and he has published over 100 papers in prestigious international journals and conferences, including top-tier venues such as SIGGRAPH(Asia), CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS.

XU Yuedong, Ph.D., is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His main research interests lie in machine learning systems. He has (previously) served as the principal investigator for four projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has published more than 30 papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including NSDI, ATC, MobiSys, MobiHoc, CoNEXT, INFOCOM, NeurIPS,  ICLR, ToN, and JSAC.

Free Rein: Global Youth AI Forum

Jianwei Huang is a Presidential Chair Professor and Associate Vice President (Institutional Development) at CUHK-Shenzhen. He holds leadership roles as Associate Director of AIRS and Director of the Shenzhen Key Research Lab of Crowd Intelligence Enabled Low Carbon Energy Networks. An IEEE and AAIA Fellow, Professor Huang is a recognized leader in network optimization, economics, and crowd intelligence. His academic contributions include 8 books and over 400 papers, with over 20,000 citations (H-index 72) and 13 international paper awards, including the 2011 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award.

Deng-Ping Fan is a Professor and Department Chair at the School of Computer Science, Nankai University. He used to be a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and served as a Research Director at IIAI (UAE). His main research focuses on AI4Science, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence. He has over 36,000 Google Scholar citations, an h-index of 64, and a single paper with more than 6k citations. He is the recipient of the MICCAI Young Scientist Publication Impact Award and has 2 CVPR Best Paper Nominations.

Yujian Ye, Ph.D., is a recipient of China’s National High-Level Talent Program and the New Era Young Pioneer Award, an IET Fellow, Young Chair Professor at Southeast University, and a Huawei Zijin Young Scholar. He serves as a jointly appointed Professor and Ph.D. supervisor at the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (Shenzhen Loop Area Institute and Beijing Zhongguancun Academy). He received his Ph.D. from Imperial College London (ICL) with the President’s Scholarship and is also an Honorary Lecturer at ICL.

Xu Chen is a Full Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, and Deputy Director of the National and Local Joint Engineering Laboratory, with selection for National and Guangdong provincial talent programs. He obtained his PhD in Information Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University in the US and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Goettingen in Germany.

Zhengjun Yue, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the LIMA Center, Shenzhen Loop Area Institute (SLAI). She received her PhD from the University of Sheffield (Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship), and subsequently held a postdoctoral position at King’s College London funded by the EPSRC. Afterwards,  she worked as an Assistant Professor (tenured) at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands.

Yang Dongping, PhD, is an assistant Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Shenzhen Loop Area Institute. He graduated from Xiamen University with a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics and Conducted postdoctoral research at Hong Kong Baptist University and the University of Sydney. His research focuses on neurodynamics and brain-inspired intelligence, with particular interests in navigation, sleep, and epilepsy, and their applications.

Zheng Zhang received the Ph.D. degree from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is currently with the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) and Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, China.

Joint-appointed Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at Shenzhen Hetao College, he has long been dedicated to fundamental theories and key technologies in the field of brain-inspired intelligence. Over the past five years, he has achieved a series of research results in brain-inspired perception, learning, and modeling, publishing over 100 academic papers in internationally authoritative journals and top-tier conferences.

Xiaojun Quan, Ph.D., Professor, Shenzhen Loop Area Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong, and has conducted research or held positions at Rutgers Business School, the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong, the Institute for Infocomm Research of A*STAR (Singapore), and the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University.

Zhang Zhiguo, Ph.D., is a professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Intelligent Science and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from The University of Hong Kong and previously served as an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research focuses on brain-computer interfaces, affective computing, and brain-like intelligence.

Xu Ruifeng, Ph.D., is Associate Dean of the College of Artificial Intelligence at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). He received his Ph.D. from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on natural language processing, affective computing, large language models, and social media analysis.

Cai Siqi, PhD, is a Professor and qualified Ph.D. Supervisor at the School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, College of Artificial Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. From 2020 to 2024, Dr. Cai was a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she was technical lead in Human-Robot Collaborative AI and Neuromorphic Computing research projects. Dr Cai’s research interests include brain-computer interface and human-robot interaction as reflected in her scientific publications and invention patents.

Sahba Zojaji is jointly appointed Assistant Professor at Shenzhen Loop Area Institute and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and serves as faculty member at the Consortium of AI for Psychology. Since December 2024 he directs the AHA Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from KTH-Royal Institute of Technology in 2024. His work has contributed to Japan’s $1 billion JST Moonshot R&D program and to EU projects MSCA-ITN ANIMATAS (~$4 million), DAISI (~$1 million), and NARECA (~$0.7 million), with results published at leading venues such as CHI, IROS, and HRI.

Tomoko Matsui, PhD (Engineering), is a Professor at the Shenzhen Loop Area Institute (SLAI). She received her PhD in Information Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her research interests include statistical machine learning, speech information processing, and spatio-temporal data analysis, with applications to climate risk, social sensing, and healthcare. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions, Speech Communication, Spatial Statistics, ICASSP, and Interspeech.

Li Haizhou, Professor, Fellow of Singapore Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow, and ISCA Fellow, serves as the Dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), and the Director of the Centre for Language, Intelligence, and Machines at Shenzhen Loop Area Institute (LIMA@SLAI). His research interests include speech and language processing, brain-inspired computing, and multimodal large language models.

[Tom Ko is currently serves as a full-time Associate Professor at SLAI and is the Deputy Director of LIMA Center. Previously, he worked as a Research Scientist at ByteDance's AI Lab and served as an Assistant Professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, and a researcher at Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab.

Konstantinos Courcoubetis is a Presidential Chair Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and previously served as Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he directed the ST-SUTD Centre for Smart Systems.A pioneer in network economics since the late 1990s, his research focuses on network and Internet economics, the sharing economy, smart grids, auctions, and regulation policy. He has also made foundational contributions to algorithmic verification.

Huang Hong, Ph.D., is an associate professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Computer Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. She earned her Master of Engineering degree from Tsinghua University in 2012 and his Ph.D. from University of Göttingen in Germany in 2016. Her primary research areas include social computing, big data analysis and mining, and AI+Health.

Benyou Wang is an Assistant Professor at Shenzhen Loop Area Institute and also an Assistant Professor, PhD supervisor, and Presidential Young Professor at the School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research interests include multimodal large foundation models, mathematical reasoning with large models, applications of large language models (in healthcare), and human–agent interaction.

Cong is the NTU President’s Chair Professor of Finance, Computing and Data Science, and an Associate Dean of Nanyang Business School. He is also the Rudd Family Endowed Chair Professor at Cornell University, a Finance Editor at the Management Science, a faculty scientist at IC3, the chief scientist at HoloBit, inaugural senior economic advisor at Chainlink Labs, and a lead founder of multiple research forums.