Yam Yeung is a Research Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and also serves as Director of the CUHK Shenzhen Research Institute and Master of Lee Woo Sing College. He read physics at CUHK for his bachelor's degree and then took master's and doctoral (ScD) degrees in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining CUHK he was a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. At CUHK he chaired the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering from 2004 to 2011 and was Interim Dean of the Faculty of Engineering in 2018. Alongside teaching he leads several large research platforms: he is principal investigator of two CUHK InnoCentres — one focused on perceptual and interactive intelligence, the other the Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park — and of the CUHK Jockey Club AI-for-the-Future Project in both its first phase (2019–2022) and second phase (2022–2026). He also led two projects commissioned by the Education Bureau on artificial-intelligence curriculum development and teacher training for secondary schools in Hong Kong. His research covers artificial intelligence, surgical robotics, computational control and smart manufacturing, and he has published more than 250 technical papers.
Yam has pushed robotics and artificial-intelligence research from the laboratory into medical and educational settings: the medical robotics centre and the AI curriculum projects connect the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park's health-technology cluster with local secondary-school teaching, while his directorship of the Shenzhen research institute ties the work into cross-border collaboration.
Achievements
- 2004 · Became chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, serving until 2011.
- 2018 · Served as Interim Dean of the Faculty of Engineering.
- 2019 · Became principal investigator of the first phase of the Jockey Club AI-for-the-Future Project.