HKU IDS Scholar Seminar Series #21:
AI Agents: The Next Financer, Artist, Engineer, and Scientist?
Abstract
This talk explores the exciting potential of AI to take on roles as Financer, Artist, Engineer, and Scientist, while examining where these capabilities reach their limits. We look at the evolution from LLMs to powerful autonomous AI agents, addressing key technical challenges including multi-step reasoning, tool integration, multi-modal context understanding, and massive information processing. Through practical insights and real-world case studies, we discover how AI agents are transforming traditional workflows and creating new opportunities for effective human-AI collaboration across these important fields.
Speaker
Prof Chao HUANG
Assistant Professor @ HKU IDS & EEE Professor Chao Huang is an Assistant Professor and PhD supervisor at the Institute of Data Science and School of Computing and Data Science, HKU. His research focuses on Large Language Models (LLMs), AI agents, and Graph Machine Learning, with over 14,000 citations on Google Scholar. Professor Huang leads the Data Intelligence Lab at HKU, specializing in AI open-source technology research. The team has launched projects including LightRAG, RAG-Anything, DeepCode, AutoAgent, AI-Researcher, AI-Trader, MiniRAG, and VideoRAG, accumulating over 77,000 GitHub stars and ranking in the global Top-200, making it to GitHub Trending 59 times. Due to his open-source contributions, Professor Huang received the "Bright Star" award at WAIC 2024, the "2024 Frontier Science Award in Theoretical Computer Science and Information Science (ICBS)" and was selected for "2025 AI100 Young Pioneers" and "2025 Global AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars." His research has been recognized as His research has been recognized among the most influential works at KDD, WWW, and SIGIR conferences, with best paper nomination awards at ACM MM 2024, WSDM 2022, and WWW 2019. For full biography of Prof. HUANG, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/chao-huang/
Moderator
Prof Qingpeng ZHANG
Associate Professor @ HKU IDS & Pharma Professor Qingpeng Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science and the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy at HKU. He received the B.S. degree in Automation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2009, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Systems and Industrial Engineering (minor in Management Information Systems) from the University of Arizona, in 2011 and 2012, respectively. His research interests include medical informatics, AI in drug discovery, healthcare data analytics and network science. His research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, PNAS, and MIS Quarterly, as well as featured in press such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, BBC, The Times, The Guardian and Ming Pao. He received The President’s Award (2022) and the Outstanding Research Award for Junior Faculty (2021) from CityU and the Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award (2021) from IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. For full biography of Prof. Qingpeng Zhang, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/qingpeng-zhang/
Moderator
Prof. Yi Ma
Director; Professor, Chair of Artificial Intelligence @ HKU IDS & Department of Computer Science
Professor Yi Ma is a Chair Professor in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (HKU IDS) and Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He took up the Directorship of HKU IDS on January 12, 2023. He is also a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published about 60 journal papers, 120 conference papers, and three textbooks in computer vision, generalized principal component analysis, and high-dimensional data analysis.
Professor Ma’s research interests cover computer vision, high-dimensional data analysis, and intelligent systems. For full biography of Professor Ma, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/yi-ma/
