Janet Hui-wen

HSIAO

蕭惠文

Janet Hsiao is a Professor in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST, she was a Professor of Psychology at University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Informatics from University of Edinburgh and was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California San Diego. She is best known for her research on learning and visual cognition, including face recognition, reading, and object detection and identification. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach, using methods and theories from artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to study the human mind. In particular, she developed the Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) method to quantify individual differences in eye movement pattern and consistency, which has revolutionized the use of eye movement data to understand cognition. She has also combined EMHMM with deep learning methods to understand the role of attention in human learning and its implications for explainable Artificial Intelligence research. She received the Best Language Modelling Paper Prize from the Cognitive Science Society in 2006 and the Early Career Award from the RGC Hong Kong in 2012. She is now a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and serves on the Governing Board. She is also Editor-in-Chief of British Journal of Psychology and an Associate Editor of Cognition.