PhD Student Mr. Lei Li Receives RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Award

Mr. Lei Li, a final-year PhD Student of the Department, is recently honored as one of the University's six awardees of the Research Grants Council’s (RGC) Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2022/23 in recognition of his outstanding performance in research.

Mr. Lei Li started his PhD study in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, under the supervision of Dr. Li Chen in 2017. His research work has mainly focused on explainable recommendations. During his PhD study, he authored and co-authored several papers published in the key conferences in the areas of natural language processing, information retrieval and data mining, such as ACL, SIGIR and CIKM.

For this postdoctoral fellowship, he will be engaging in the project entitled “Causal Inference for Natural Language Processing in Recommender Systems”. In particular, he will try to address societal bias issues, such as stereotype and gender bias, in natural language processing (NLP) models that are trained on human-generated corpora and therefore inevitably possess the bias in our common sense. Reducing the bias could thus promote fairness-aware recommender systems, with the potential benefits on users either online or offline.

The RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme aims to encourage doctoral graduates in pursuing career in research and provide promising researchers with support at a pivotal time in their very early career, so as to ensure a supply of talent with scientific and research skills for research and development in Hong Kong. The scheme will support up to 50 awardees for a period of 36 months in terms of full-time appointment as a postdoctoral fellow.