Dr. Chen Li has established a well-earned reputation as an active researcher in human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) and recommender systems.

Her research acumen is best demonstrated by a track record with more than 120 published papers, most of them in high-impact journals like the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) and the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), or were otherwise presented at top-tier conferences including the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI). With a respectable Google Scholar H-index of 44 as at February 2023, Dr. Chen has also been enlisted in the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University for three consecutive years, from 2020 to 2022.

As the leader of the Department of Computer Science’s Human-Computer Interaction and Recommender Systems (HCI-RecSys) Research Group, Dr. Chen is a caring and effective supervisor to inspire her students to achieve academic excellence and has trained more than 20 research postgraduates (RPg) and post-doctorate students. Her style of supervision facilitates the development of the students’ personal, professional and career strengths.

To encourage intellectual discussion and the exchange of ideas, Dr. Chen holds individual meetings regularly with her students in order to ensure that they have received sufficient guidance for their research, as well as having weekly group meetings to facilitate peer learning in a collegial environment. Furthermore, she organizes regular meetings with scholars from other domains such as social science or journalism. In this way, she broadens her students’ perspectives in different subject matters and paves the way for them to undertake future multi-disciplinary projects. She also actively seeks research collaboration opportunities with external researchers in universities and industry, including Rutgers University (USA), Macquarie University (Australia), University of Klagenfurt (Austria), Alibaba, Huawei, Wisers AI lab, to name a few.

Under Dr. Chen’s supervision, her students have won awards both within HKBU and externally, including the Research Grants Council (RGC) Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme Award in 2022, the Honourable Mention Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2022, the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT’22), the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalisation (UMAP) in 2015 and 2020, the Best Paper Award of the User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction Journal (UMUAI) in 2018, as well as the HKBU Madam Kwok Chung Bo Fun PhD Student Research Excellence Award (3rd prize) in 2022.

Her trained students have all secured research positions in industrial labs or faculty positions at renowned universities, with six of them now working as Professor, Associate Professors, or Lecturers at universities.

Serving as the Coordinator of the Annual Departmental Postgraduate Day during 2016-2021, and the Coordinator of the Departmental RPg Programme starting from 2021, she has created a stimulating research environment that fosters students’ creativity and innovation. She also serves as the Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), as the Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), as well as the General Co-Chair of the 2023 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys’23).

With such a clear demonstration of her commitment to nurturing new talents in the emerging fields of AI and recommender systems, the Selection Committee believes that Dr. Chen is a truly worthy recipient of the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision.