About

Prof. Andy Chun

Prof. Andy Chun is a leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer and global technology visionary with over three decades of R&D and IT management experience. He has been involved with the design and development of numerous mission critical AI systems in Hong Kong and around the world. Chun's AI work focuses on leveraging AI for digital transformation and empowering organizations and large enterprises to become more efficient and effective at delivering high quality services and products. He is an internationally recognized expert on a wide range of technologies, frequently consulted by the media as well as invited as a keynote speaker in different industry conferences.

Chun is widely known as the AI pioneer in Hong Kong. He designed and developed Hong Kong's very first commercially deployed AI system back in the early 90's for the Kai Tak Airport, performing critical AI decision making and problem-solving for one of the world's busiest air traffic hubs. In late 90's, Chun developed the world's first pure-Java AI constraint programming engine, called JSolver, soon after the Java language was first released. JSolver eventually became part of what is now IBM Watson's Decision Optimization suite. In early 2000, Chun developed an AI system for Hong Kong's railway system, MTR, to plan, optimize, and manage all engineering works at this world's busiest railway. Since then, all engineering works performed along the running lines were scheduled using AI, contributing to the high international service standards provided by MTR. In 2017, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI)   AI Magazine named this MTR AI system as one of the world's top 10 highest impact AI systems over the past 30 year history of AI.

Background

Chun worked with AI pioneers Donald Michie   and David Waltz   during his graduate research, working on problem solving, reasoning, knowledge representation, and massively parallel computing. After receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he then joined Patrick Winston's   MIT startup, Ascent Technology Inc., which specialized in AI systems for the transportation, defense, and finance industries around the world.

Chun is also a tech entrepreneur, and have extensive experience in startup operations. He established the Greater China office for InterFace Computer, a leading German AI software firm. He also founded several technology subsidiaries for City University of Hong Kong and acted as their CEO. One of them, BonVision Technology Ltd, was acquired by the First Shanghai Investments Limited (HKEx:227) and then the Vanda Group, a member of the Hutchison Global Communications Holdings Ltd (HKEx:757). Chun has also been a technologist consultant to Wall Street venture capital firms, and assisted them in assessing multi-million USD technology deals.

Chun taught briefly at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before joining City University of Hong Kong, where he served initially at the Electronic Engineering Department and then the Computer Science Department. From 2009-2015, Chun also served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for City University of Hong Kong. For his innovative use of technology for higher education, he received the Hong Kong CIO Award as well as the China Top 5 CIO Award.

In 2018, Chun joined Prudential plc, a global financial services company headquartered in London and Hong Kong. As the Regional Director of Technology Innovation at Prudential, Chun led the digital innovation and adoption of cutting-edge technologies, including data, AI, Web3 and Metaverse, across 24 countries. He supported Prudential's digital ecosystem strategy of improving customers' health and wealth by advancing AI digital transformation throughout the entire customer journey, from customer acquisition, risk assessment, and underwriting to claims processing and fraud detection. He also coached and mentored global AI teams, defined the AI ethics and governance framework for generative AI, and created the global AI review quality standards. As the "Prof" for Prudential, he led global talent development and achieved 10x growth in skills for emerging technologies. Chun was responsible for driving Prudential's culture of continuous learning and continuous innovation, enabling Prudential to innovate at scale and pace.

From 2012-2017, he served as a member of Hong Kong Government's Digital 21 Strategy Advisory Committee  , which is highest-level Hong Kong Government advisory body on all matters relating to information technology. In 2019, Chun was elected a Council member to the Hong Kong Computer Society. Since 2017, Chun has been heading the Hong Kong Computer Society's AI Specialist Group, promoting AI and advising the government on AI and IT policies.

Focus

Chun has over three decades of experience with successful commercial AI deployment for some of the largest organizations in Hong Kong and around the world. As early as 1992, Chun oversaw Hong Kong's first successful mission critical AI system deployment at Hong Kong's original airport at Kai Tak that optimizes airport gate management and aircraft ground movements. Since then, he has worked with some of the largest enterprises in Hong Kong to optimize operations and decision support to maximize benefits from digital transformation. AI systems deployed at organizations such as the Hospital Authority, Immigration Department, and Mass Transit Railway, are improving the quality of life for millions of citizens and visitors daily! Many of those AI projects have led to local and international recognitions for innovation excellence, including the prestigious Asia-Pacific ICT Awards, Hong Kong ICT Awards, and the "Innovative Applications of AI Award" from the international Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)  .

AI Technologies

Over the years of AI project development, a large body of proprietary AI tools, algorithms, and frameworks have been created that can be used to solve a wide range of hard problems in planning, scheduling, optimization, rostering, and machine learning. The AI technology runs on popular cloud platforms and is interfaced with existing IT systems via standard REST APIs. The AI technologies used include modern rule-based technologies, constraint programming, heuristic search, data-mining, text-mining, machine learning, evolutionary algorithms such as genetic algorithms (GA) and artificial neural networks.

Through AI work with many different industries, we have designed the best combination of AI techniques and algorithms to solve a wide range of optimization problems that are common across industries, such optimizing resources and workflows to achieve maximal performance and agility. Through knowledge engineering work, we have helped many enterprises analyze knowledge used by their most experienced human experts and capture this valuable knowledge asset as AI that can be reused by novices to achieve expert quality results.

Because the AI systems built are usually highly mission critical, the architectures used are often fault-tolerant with high resilience and availability, supporting 24x7 operations. In some cases, the AI engine runs as a highly-scalable cloud service, offering "AI as a micro-service."

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