Liangliang Cao

In 2026, I joined the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a Chair Professor. Returning to Hong Kong is a full-circle moment for me. Twenty years ago, I received my M.Phil. degree from the Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoou Tang and Prof. Jianzhuang Liu. I then moved to the United States to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Prof. Thomas S. Huang. Before joining PolyU, I was a Principal Engineer and Director at Google DeepMind. For more than a decade, I have worked on intelligent assistants and AI agents, contributing to Gemini, Google Assistant, Apple Intelligence, IBM Watson, and Switi Inc., a startup I co-founded that was acquired by Google in 2018. More recently, my research has focused on AI assistants for special education, particularly for children with autism. My research interests span c