Waterloo Engineering alum Albert (Feng) Yang (PhD ‘95) has donated $1 million to establish the Yang Family Professorship, a new fund supporting artificial intelligence (AI) research focused on responsible innovation and real-world impact.
Yang established the professorship in honour of his former PhD supervisor, Dr. Andrew Wong, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Systems Design Engineering, who will serve as the inaugural holder.
Yang is the founder of Topaz Labs, an Emmy-award-winning company that builds AI-powered image and video enhancement tools. He credits Waterloo’s applied research environment and Wong’s mentorship for shaping his career. “I’ve always been grateful to the University of Waterloo,” he said, adding that honouring Wong felt like a natural way to give back.
The professorship backs AI work that is foundational or applied across fields such as robotics, health care, manufacturing and information systems, with the goal of measurable gains in performance, safety and user benefit.
Wong is the founding director of Waterloo’s Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Lab, established in 1984. His best-known technology, pattern discovery and disentanglement (PDD), finds hidden patterns in data and untangles overlapping data points. Wong will use the funding to continue this research.
Yang sees the moment as pivotal. He describes AI as a revolution rather than an evolution and encourages students to be entrepreneurial and use the technology to solve important problems — hoping his gift helps ensure AI benefits Canada and society more broadly.
Go to Advancing AI research in honour of a former professor for the full story.