AI for the Well-being Economy @HKUST
Welcome to our research lab. We are committed to developing AI-driven solutions to enhance human well-being, with a focus on supporting the social and emotional aspects of human behavior. We believe that advancing human well-being can create substantial economic value for individuals, organizations, and society.
Director (PI)
Prof. Zijun (June) Shi
Personal Webpage: https://www.zijunshi.com/
June is an Associate Professor at the School of Business and Management, an affiliated faculty at the HKUST Big Data Institute, and a core member of the AI Ethics and Governance Lab at HKUST. Her research applies theories and methods from economics, psychology, and machine learning to investigate how AI technologies can be leveraged to (1) enhance human social and emotional well-being, and (2) improve market efficiency. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Administration and M.S. in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.
Co-Directors
​Prof. Junxian He
Personal Webpage: https://jxhe.github.io/
Junxian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST. His research focus is on natural language processing, specializing in long-horizon reasoning and planning of large language models. He obtained his Ph.D. from Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He also worked at Facebook AI Research and Salesforce Research.
Prof. Mengze Shi
Personal Webpage: https://mark.hkust.edu.hk/faculty-and-staff/directory/mengzeshi
Mengze is the Yuk-Shee Chan Professor of Business at HKUST. He specializes in customer relationship management, sales management, and marketing innovation. Before joining HKUST, Mengze served as Ellison Professor of Marketing at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University.
​Prof. Chen Cheng
Personal Webpage: https://chencheng1.weebly.com/
Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at HKUST. She is a developmental psychologist with a focus on cognitive science. Her research centers on understanding the developing human mind, particularly in children and adolescents, within social and cognitive contexts. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental and Brain Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Boston and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University before joining HKUST.
Research Themes
AI for Human Social Well-being
We investigate how AI can be leveraged to serve human users' social needs in various contexts, such as companionship, social media content consumption and creation, and conversation skill enhancement for service providers.
AI for Human Emotional Well-being
We investigate how AI can empower mental health services for human society. For instance, we examine whether LLMs can provide psychotherapy on par with trained human professionals; we also study how AI and human therapists should work together to better serve clients.
Social and Emotional Intelligence of AI
AI's emotional intelligence is the key for a sound support for human social and mental well-being. We investigate the science behind the emotional intelligence of AI and explore how to improve it for relevant applications.