Vincent Yu Sun Lum is the founding chairman of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His academic training spanned three North American universities: a bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in 1960, a master's degree at the University of Washington in 1961 and a PhD at the University of Illinois in 1966, after which information systems remained his main line of research. Before coming to Hong Kong he worked for IBM for twenty-five years, mostly in its research division, where he initiated and took part in projects on information analysis and organisation, systems analysis and design, database systems, office automation and information retrieval. He then moved to the Computer Science Department of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he was a professor and served as department chairman. In 1991 he returned to Hong Kong and joined CUHK as a professor with the task of building a new department; he was founding chairman of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management from 1991 to 1996 and set its direction in teaching and research. In academic service he has chaired two technical committees of the IEEE Computer Society, sat on the editorial boards of several international journals and organised and chaired a number of international conferences. At CUHK his research turned to Chinese-language computing and to ways of integrating local culture into software systems. He retired in 1997 and was made an Emeritus Professor in 1998. His published work includes a 1994 ICCPOL paper on an unconventional Chinese database query language and a 1996 Visual 96 paper on approximate retrieval of multimedia objects using natural language queries.
Lum brought database and information-retrieval experience from IBM and the Naval Postgraduate School to Hong Kong, became the first head of CUHK's systems engineering department, and was among the earlier researchers in the city to work on Chinese-language computing, moving from database query languages to natural-language retrieval of multimedia material.
Achievements
- 1966 · Completed his PhD at the University of Illinois.
- 1991 · Joined CUHK as a professor and set up the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management.
- 1997 · Retired from CUHK and became Emeritus Professor the following year.