Decades after graduating from the University of Waterloo, an alum has established an endowed professorship to advance responsible research in artificial intelligence (AI) in honour of his former PhD supervisor.
Albert (Feng) Yang (PhD '95) launched the Yang Family Professorship with a $1 million investment in recognition of Dr. Andrew Wong, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Systems Design Engineering.
(L-R): Albert (Feng) Yang, Dr. Andrew Wong and Dean Mary Wells. Photo credit: Samuel Chen, Faculty of Engineering.
The professorship supports AI scholarship with an emphasis on responsible innovation and real-world impact. Research can span foundational and applied work across practical domains such as robotics, health care, manufacturing and information systems, with the goal of delivering measurable improvements in performance, safety and user benefit.
Yang, founder of Topaz Labs, an Emmy-award-winning software company that specializes in AI-powered image and video enhancement tools, credits Waterloo's applied research environment and Wong's mentorship for instilling in him the value of pursuing ideas that are both technically rigorous and impactful in the real world.
"I have always been grateful to the University of Waterloo," Yang says. "Especially for the time I spent under Professor Wong's supervision. His passionate energy for research was infectious and his belief in me never wavered. I feel very fortunate that I have been able to directly apply what I learned at Waterloo throughout my career and honouring Professor Wong felt like the most natural and appropriate way to give back."
"Albert Yang's generosity is a powerful testament to the lifelong impact of a Waterloo education," says Dr. Bill Rosehart, President of the University of Waterloo. By honouring Professor Andrew Wong in an investment that supports responsible AI research, Albert is helping Waterloo advance innovation that not only pushes the boundaries of technology but also serves society in meaningful ways. This gift reflects the very best of Waterloo mentorship, discovery and impact."
Untangling patterns in data to improve trust in AI
Wong's research and career have centred on making sense of complex data, developing methods that don't just identify patterns but make them easier for humans to interpret and assess. He is the founding director of Waterloo's Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Lab which was established in 1984 to improve how automated machines like robotic arms see and interpret objects through data pattern recognition.
He co-founded Virtek Vision International in 1986 to commercialize the lab's core pattern recognition and laser technologies, and co-founded the Centre for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (CPAMI), a University-wide expansion of the lab, in 2011.
One of the most prominent AI technologies developed by Wong and CPAMI is pattern discovery and disentanglement (PDD) which finds the hidden clues in data and untangles messy, overlapping data points to understand how the bits come together to make the whole. A 2024 study published in Bioengineering shows how PDD can improve the reliability of AI in health care. Analysing more than 10,000 intensive-care patient records used in sepsis research, Wong's team flagged 1,150 records as potentially mislabelled or unreliable highlighting the importance of checking the data that AI system learn from.
As the inaugural holder of the professorship, Wong has funding to continue his investigation of PDD to extract reliable, explainable information from complex datasets.
"The gift came at the right time," Wong says. "The research foundation is set. What this support allows us to do is build on this foundation and evaluate how broadly our work can be applied."
Yang, whose career has given him a close view of both AI's power and its risks, believes strongly in the transformative potential of AI for humanity.
"AI is truly a revolution, not just an evolution,' Yang says. "It creates enormous opportunities in almost every field, and I hope students will embrace this historic opportunity. I especially encourage them to be entrepreneurial. Find an important problem. Build a startup or a product to solve that problem. Use AI as your superpower.
"It is one of the most fundamental developments in human history. I hope my gift can support Waterloo's research in pattern discovery and disentanglement and help ensure that AI benefits Canada and society more broadly."
