Hou Pong Chan, Ken

Research Scientist

Alibaba DAMO Academy
Singapore R&D Center
Email: kenchanhp at gmail dot com

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Biography

I am a research scientist at the Alibaba DAMO Academy, Singapore R&D Center. Prior to that, I was a visiting postdoc researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working with Prof. Heng Ji, and was a visiting lecturer (Macao Fellow) at the University of Macau. I received my Ph.D. degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020, advised by Prof. Irwin King. During my Ph.D. studies, I was also a Visiting Ph.D. Student at Northeastern University in Spring 2019, working with Prof. Lu Wang. My research focuses on improving the trustworthiness of LLMs.

News

  • [06/2025] We released Lingshu, a Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning.
  • [05/2025] Two papers accepted by ACL 2025.
  • [11/2024] One paper accepted by TKDE and three papers accepted by COLING 2025.
  • [08/2024] I gave a talk about SeaLLMs 3 at MLNLP 2024.
  • [07/2024] We released SeaLLMs 3, our latest LLMs for Southeast Asian languages.
  • [05/2024] One paper accepted by ACL 2024 Findings.
  • [10/2023] Two papers accepted by EMNLP 2023.
  • [5/2023] Four papers accepted by ACL 2023 (including Findings).

Open-sourced LLMs

Preprints

Publications (* indicates equal contribution) [Google Scholar]

2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 Before 2021 (Before my PhD graduation)

Honors & Awards

Outstanding Reviewer, ACL, 2021
Outstanding Reviewer, EMNLP, 2020
The Best Teaching Assistant Award, CSE Department, CUHK, 2018
The Best Teaching Assistant Award, CSE Department, CUHK, 2017
Dean's list, Engineering Faculty, CUHK, 2014
Dean's list, Engineering Faculty, CUHK, 2013

Professional Activities

  • Senior Area Chair: AACL 2025

  • Local Co-chair: MT Summit 2023

  • Session Chair: ICONIP 2020 Tutorial Session

  • SPC Member: IJCAI 2021

  • Conference Reviewer: ACL ARR 2023-2025, IROS 2023, AAAI 2023, EMNLP 2022, ACL 2022, AAAI 2022, EMNLP 2021, ACL 2021, NAACL 2021, AAAI 2021, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2020, AAAI 2020, EMNLP 2019, AAAI 2019

  • Journal Reviewer: IEEE TKDE, IEEE/ACM TASLP, ACM TALLIP, KBS Journal

  • Teaching Assistant

    2018 Spring CSCI2100A Data Structures
    2017 Fall CSCI2100 Data Structures
    2017 Spring CSCI3180 Principles of Programming Languages
    2016 Spring CSCI2100A Data Structures
    2015 Fall ENGG2120 Introduction to Digital and Microprocessor Systems