Pascale Fung

Pascale Fung is a natural-language processing and speech researcher, co-founder and Chief Research and Innovation Officer of AMI, and Chair Professor in the departments of Electronic and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She is the founding director of HKUST's Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an elected Fellow of the IEEE, ISCA, ACL, and AAAI, and a long-running expert on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence. As of May 2026, she leads research and innovation at AMI following the company's $1.03 billion seed round announced March 9, 2026, while retaining her HKUST chair professorship.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1988); Master of Science in Computer Science, Columbia University (1993); Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, Columbia University (1997).
• Current roles: Co-founder and Chief Research and Innovation Officer of AMI since late 2025; Chair Professor at HKUST since the late 1990s; Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
• Key contributions: Pioneer of statistical models for multilingual natural-language processing and speech recognition, including early work on parallel-text alignment and code-switching; founder and director of HKUST CAiRE from 2018 to 2024; co-founder of HKUST's Human Language Technology Center; sustained research line on empathetic and ethical conversational agents.
• Fellowships: IEEE Fellow (2015), ISCA Fellow (2015), ACL Fellow (2020), AAAI Fellow (2022).
• Recognition: Forbes 50 Over 50: Asia (2024), Outstanding Women Professionals and Entrepreneurs Award (2017), Top 50 Women of Hope (2014).
• X / Twitter: @pascalefung
• LinkedIn: pascale-fung-a3aa05139
• Personal site: pascalefung.com
• Google Scholar: Pascale Fung

Origins

Fung was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Hong Kong. Her professional name in Chinese is 馮雁. She left for the United States as an undergraduate, completing a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988. After graduation she spent the late 1980s and early 1990s as a research student in Japan and France before returning to the United States for graduate study, a multi-country trajectory that anchored her later work on multilingual systems.

She moved through several research environments before her doctorate. From 1989 to 1991 she was a research student at Kyoto University. In 1991 she was a visiting researcher at LIMSI, the speech and language laboratory of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. From 1991 to 1992 she was an Associate Scientist at BBN Systems and Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She joined Columbia University in 1992 for her doctorate, completing the master's in 1993 and the PhD in 1997.

Career

During her doctoral studies Fung was a research affiliate with AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1993 to 1997, working on statistical natural-language processing and machine translation. The Bell Labs period placed her in the same research environment that produced several of the senior speech and language researchers of the 1990s and early 2000s. Her PhD work centered on aligning parallel text across languages, a problem central to early statistical machine translation.

Fung joined HKUST in the late 1990s as an Assistant Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering, ascending to Chair Professor and a joint appointment in Computer Science and Engineering. At HKUST she co-founded the Human Language Technology Center, which became a long-running base for her group's work on Chinese, English, and code-switched language. The HKUST years produced more than three hundred peer-reviewed publications and a sustained research line on multilingual NLP, dialogue systems, and conversational AI.

In 2018 Fung established and became founding director of HKUST's Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), a university-wide research center coordinating work across speech, NLP, computer vision, machine learning, and AI ethics. She directed CAiRE through 2024. The center hosted research labs across natural-language processing, robotics, and AI ethics and governance. Her public commentary on AI policy and ethics during this period extended into international forums.

Fung joined Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) organization in 2022 as a Distinguished Consultant on Responsible AI, then transitioned into a senior research role. By 2023 she was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google, and through 2024 and 2025 she was Senior Director of AI Research at Meta-FAIR, based in Paris, leading research on AI agents and physical and mental world modeling in collaboration with Meta's GenAI and Meta AI groups. The Meta-FAIR period overlapped with Yann LeCun's tenure as Chief AI Scientist at the company and provided the working relationship that led to AMI.

In late 2025 Fung co-founded AMI with Yann LeCun and Alexandre LeBrun, taking the role of Chief Research and Innovation Officer. The AMI launch followed LeCun's departure from Meta on November 19, 2025. AMI's $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation was announced March 9, 2026, placing the company at approximately $4.5 billion post-money. She retains her HKUST chair professorship in parallel with the AMI role and divides time between Hong Kong, Paris, and AMI's other operating sites.

Affiliations

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Kyoto University, LIMSI / CNRS, BBN Systems and Technologies: Research and graduate study, 1988 to 1992.
• Columbia University: MSc and PhD in Computer Science, 1992 to 1997.
• AT&T Bell Laboratories: Research affiliate, 1993 to 1997.
• Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: Assistant Professor through Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering, late 1990s to present; founding director of CAiRE, 2018 to 2024.
• Meta AI / FAIR: Distinguished Consultant on Responsible AI then Senior Director of AI Research, 2022 to 2025.
• Google: Visiting Faculty Researcher, 2023.
• AMI: Co-founder and Chief Research and Innovation Officer, late 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Fung's published record is one of the longest sustained NLP and speech-research careers in the field, with more than three hundred peer-reviewed papers and several research lines that opened or extended core areas.

• Statistical alignment for multilingual NLP. Her doctoral and early-faculty work on aligning parallel text across languages contributed foundational methods for statistical machine translation between English and Chinese, including some of the earliest published treatments of code-switched language.
• Empathetic conversational AI. A long-running research line on systems that recognize and respond to human emotional state. Her TWIML AI podcast appearance (2017) and Carnegie Council "Can You Code Empathy?" lecture (2022) summarize the broader research agenda.
• HKUST CAiRE (2018 to 2024). Founded and led the university-wide research center coordinating natural-language processing, computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and AI ethics work across HKUST.
• AI ethics and governance. Sustained public-engagement work through the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence, the Partnership on AI, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Her public framing emphasizes responsibility, multilingual fairness, and human-centered design.
• IROS 2022 keynote. "Responsible and Empathetic Human Robot Interactions" presented to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems on integrating empathy modeling into robot interaction.
• Recent AMI-era public commentary. Her Rise of AI 2025 keynote on the future of AI agents was delivered while she was a Director at Meta-FAIR and frames the shift from large language models toward agent systems and world models that became part of the AMI thesis.

Investments and boards

• AMI (AI): Co-founder and Chief Research and Innovation Officer, late 2025 to present. AMI announced a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation on March 9, 2026.

No public personal angel-investor activity is on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

Fung's longest-running professional relationships sit in the speech and natural-language-processing communities of the 1990s and 2000s. The Bell Labs period (1993 to 1997) placed her among a generation of statistical-NLP researchers who later moved into senior industry research positions; her PhD adviser group at Columbia and her BBN colleagues continued as collaborators through her HKUST years.

The HKUST faculty network is the deepest layer of her professional ties. The Human Language Technology Center co-founders and the CAiRE leadership cohort are her longest research collaborators. Her CAiRE successor and current HKUST colleagues continue the center's research program.

The AMI founding cohort places her alongside Yann LeCun, Alexandre LeBrun, Saining Xie (Chief Science Officer), Michael Rabbat (Vice President for World Models), and Laurent Solly (Chief Operating Officer). The LeCun connection through Meta-FAIR (2022 to 2025) is the structural anchor of her current career position. Public commentary has paired her recruitment with Xie's as the principal research-credibility validators for AMI's seed round.

Position in the field

Fung occupies a distinctive position in NLP and speech research. The combination of a Bell Labs research start, a multi-decade HKUST chair professorship, the founding of CAiRE, and three full-fellowship recognitions from IEEE, ISCA, ACL, and AAAI is unusual; few peers carry equivalently broad professional-society standing. The senior research-leadership transition first to Meta-FAIR and then to AMI further extends a career that already spanned academic, industrial, and governance dimensions.

The AMI Chief Research and Innovation Officer role places her at the center of the most-watched non-LLM frontier-research bet of 2026. Industry coverage has placed her recruitment alongside Saining Xie's as one of the principal validating data points for AMI's $4.5 billion post-money seed valuation, given the company is pre-product. Her research record provides credibility on multilingual NLP, dialogue, and human-centered AI, complementing Xie's vision-research record and LeCun's world-models thesis.

Fung is among a small cohort of women holding co-founder and senior-leadership positions at frontier AI labs. Industry coverage has noted the gender and regional dimensions, including the Forbes 50 Over 50: Asia 2024 recognition and her WEF Global Future Council appointments. Cross-references in this dimension include Fei-Fei Li at World Labs and Lila Ibrahim at Google DeepMind.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• First AMI publications under Fung's name. Whether AMI will produce papers led by her group, and whether they extend the JEPA family or open new research directions in multilingual or human-centered AI.
• HKUST role continuity. Whether she retains the chair professorship at full effort or scales it back during AMI's launch period; her HKUST presence has been a structural feature of her career for more than two decades.
• Empathy and conversational research at AMI. AMI's stated focus is world models, but Fung's published record on empathetic and conversational AI is distinct. Whether her research line is integrated into AMI's roadmap or held in parallel is a watchable signal.
• Multilingual fairness at AMI scale. AMI's investor base spans Europe, Asia, and the United States. Whether the company commits explicit research effort to multilingual coverage and code-switched-language handling, areas central to Fung's published record, is open.
• Public commentary on AI policy. Fung has been an active voice on AI ethics, governance, and responsibility through the WEF, Partnership on AI, and Carnegie Council. Whether the AMI period sharpens or shifts her public position is open.
• Continued recognition. Whether the TIME 100 AI list, Forbes 50 Over 50, or further professional-society honors continue to recognize her work as AMI's profile grows.

Sources

• Pascale Fung personal site. Personal academic and AMI Labs landing page.
• Pascale Fung HKUST faculty profile. HKUST Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering profile, including education and pre-HKUST research-history detail.
• Pascale Fung HKUST faculty-profiles page. HKUST chair-professor entry, including publication count and research interests.
• HKUST establishes Centre for AI Research. HKUST press release on the September 2018 launch of CAiRE under Fung's directorship.
• Pascale Fung Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia summary of biographical and career detail.
• Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03B to build world models. TechCrunch on the March 2026 AMI seed announcement and founding leadership.
• Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) is Enabling the Next AI Revolution. Cathay Innovation announcement of the AMI seed and founding leadership team.
• IROS 2022 Keynote: Responsible and Empathetic Human Robot Interactions. Fung's keynote address at IROS 2022 on integrating empathy into robot interaction.
• The Future of AI Agents - Pascale Fung at Rise of AI 2025. Recent keynote at Rise of AI Conference 2025 on agent systems and the shift beyond pure LLMs.
• Can You Code Empathy? with Pascale Fung. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs interview, March 2022.
• Forbes 50 Over 50: Asia 2024. Forbes 50 Over 50 Asia recognition listing.
• Photo: Pascale Fung Wikipedia entry, CC-BY-SA 4.0 by VPRO via Wikimedia Commons.