Professor YAO Wenfang

Research Assistant Professor

BSc (SYSU), PhD (PolyU)

Prof. YAO Wenfang is a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Artificial Intelligence, School of Data Science, Lingnan University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoqi Yang, and her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Sun Yat-sen University. Prior to joining Lingnan University, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Jing (Harry) Qin at the School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests lie in healthcare analytics and clinical multimodal learning, with a focus on modeling heterogeneous and incomplete data for disease diagnosis and progression analysis. She also works on optimization theory and its applications to reliable and robust machine learning. She has published in leading venues such as NeurIPS, AAAI, SIAM Journal on Optimization, and Mathematical Programming, and has served as a reviewer for top conferences including NeurIPS and ICLR, as well as journals in optimization and medical informatics.

Research Interests:

• Clinical Multimodal Learning

• Generative Models

• Optimization for Machine Learning