Lai Wan Chan

Timeline

1. By 1987

   Cambridge and back-propagation training

   She earns B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University, supported by a Prince Philip Scholarship and a King's College Studentship, and works in the Speech, Vision and Robotics Group led by Professor Frank Fallside. In 1987, she coauthors 'An adaptive training algorithm for back propagation networks' in Computer Speech and Language.

2. 1991–1995

   Neural networks for speech

   She is co-principal investigator of a Croucher Foundation project on speech recognition and synthesis using neural networks, which runs from 1991 to 1995. In 1995, she coauthors 'Tone recognition of isolated Cantonese syllables' with Tan Lee, Brian Mak and others.

3. 1994–1996

   IEEE chapter chair and ICONIP'96

   She chairs the IEEE Hong Kong Section Computer Chapter in 1994, and serves as organizing co-chair of the International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP'96) in September 1996.

4. 1998–2000

   Co-founding the IDEAL conference

   In 1998, she helps found IDEAL, the international conference on intelligent data engineering and automated learning, and serves as program chair of IDEAL'98. In 2000, she is co-chair of IDEAL 2000 and co-editor of its Springer proceedings, Data Mining, Financial Engineering and Intelligent Agents.

5. 1998–2013

   Division head and associate dean

   From 1998 to 2002, she is Head of the Division of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and from 2004 to 2013, she is Associate Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Engineering.

6. 2000–2009

   Independent component analysis in finance

   In 2000, she publishes 'Applying Independent Component Analysis to Factor Model in Finance' in the IDEAL 2000 proceedings, and in 2001 she publishes 'Selection of Independent Factor Model in Finance' with Siu-Ming Cha for the third international conference on independent component analysis, held in San Diego. With Kun Zhang, she publishes papers on blind separation and independent component analysis in Neural Computation in 2005 and 2006, and on factor GARCH models in Quantitative Finance in 2009.

7. 2018–2019

   Causal inference and domain generalization

   In 2018, she coauthors a paper at Neural Information Processing Systems that generalizes the additive noise model for causal inference to a mixture of such models, with Shoubo Hu, Zhitang Chen, Vahid Partovi Nia and Yanhui Geng. In 2019, she coauthors Multidomain Discriminant Analysis, a domain generalization method for classification, with Shoubo Hu, Kun Zhang and Zhitang Chen.

8. As of October 2026

   Emeritus professor at CUHK

   In 2026, she is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests cover neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence, financial data analysis, data mining, causal analysis, speech processing and bioinformatics.