Prof. Kay Chen TAN

Award Citation

Professor Kay Chen TAN, Head of the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is an IEEE Fellow and a world-renowned expert in AI, evolutionary computation, and machine learning. His global influence is underscored by his recognition as a "Highly Cited Researcher 2024" by Clarivate and as the recipient of the 2026 IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award. He has co-authored over 400 peer-reviewed articles, with over 35,000 citations on Google Scholar.

Professor Tan has been awarded the RGC Senior Research Fellow for his project, “Towards Adaptive Pretrained Vision-Language Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis.” This pioneering research aims to build an integrated intelligent healthcare system to deliver personalized, human-centric healthcare service by adapting large-scale, generalist AI models into highly accurate specialist models for medical imaging. It will enable advanced functionalities, such as visual question answering, automated radiology report generation, and computer-aided diagnosis. The project will build a robust and scalable framework, pioneering data-efficient and privacy-preserving methodologies, and creating clinical applications that are practical, interpretable, and widely generalizable.

This fellowship honors Professor Tan's outstanding leadership and contributions. His work is poised to enhance the healthcare quality and efficiency, alleviate the immense burden on medical resources, and solidify Hong Kong’s leadership in AI-powered healthcare innovation. By advancing the applications of trustworthy AI, this research will ultimately transform patient care and create a lasting impact on the diagnosis and management of complex diseases.