The Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (HKU IDS) is pleased to share that Jiahang CAO, a Year 1 PhD student at HKU IDS, has been selected for the 2026 Chinese Institute of Electronics – Tencent Doctoral Research Incentive Project for Hunyuan Large Models.

Jiahang is one of only 44 doctoral students selected from 329 applications nationwide, representing an acceptance rate of approximately 13%. He is also one of three awardees from The University of Hong Kong included in the official selection results.

Jointly initiated by the Chinese Institute of Electronics and Tencent, the programme supports doctoral students conducting research in large-model-related technologies. Each selected student will receive RMB 100,000 in research funding, together with access to research practice platforms and other forms of academic support.

The 2026 selection is the third cohort of the programme. Candidates progressed through eligibility screening, online expert review, and panel defence before the final 44 awardees were selected. The programme covers research areas including large language models and pre-training, multimodal understanding and generation, AI agents and digital humans, AI infrastructure and training optimisation, and trusted data construction and evaluation for large models.

Supervised by Prof Andrew LUO and Prof Ping LUO at HKU IDS, Jiahang conducts research in robot learning, deep generative models, and cognitive-inspired models. His work explores how generative modelling and principles of human cognition can improve machine perception, language understanding, and decision-making in complex environments.

Jiahang’s selection, alongside two other HKU doctoral students, reflects the University’s strong representation in this competitive national research programme and IDS’ contribution to emerging research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and intelligent systems.

Congratulations to Jiahang on this achievement!