Hongxia Yang

Yang Hongxia is a leading AI scientist who left ByteDance in the US, where she served as Head of LLM (large language models), to join Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) as a professor in the Department of Computing in 2024, later being named PolyU's Vobile Group Professor in Generative Artificial Intelligence and Chair Professor of Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Yang earned her bachelor's degree in statistics from Nankai University in Tianjin and her PhD from Duke University. Her career has spanned both academia and industry, including roles as AI Scientist and Director at Alibaba Group's Damo Academy, Principal Data Scientist at Yahoo!, and Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, alongside adjunct professorships at Zhejiang University. At Alibaba she played a pivotal role in developing the 10-trillion-parameter M6 multimodal model, a predecessor to Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen model, and she founded the foundation model teams at both Alibaba and ByteDance. At PolyU, she serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Executive Director of the PolyU Academy for AI, pursuing a "Model-over-Models" paradigm to democratize large language model training through her venture InfiX.ai.