Scientist-turned-CUHK president puts independent thinking at heart of AI education

HONG KONG — When asked what surprised him most about artificial intelligence (AI), Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, vice-chancellor and president of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), turned to the four letters that make up human DNA: A, C, T and G. Speaking to The Korea Times at the university’s campus in Hong Kong, the renowned geneticist explained how AI had helped his research team uncover information hidden within those familiar sequences — a finding that surprised even a scientist whose earlier work transformed prenatal testing. “AI is just a tool. It is not our master,” Lo said. For a scientist who now leads one of Asia’s major research universities, that distinction matters as much in the classroom as it does in the laboratory. His team had wondered whether DNA sequences held information that conventional analysis could not readily detect. “We developed a generative AI model,” he said. “Surprisingly, we find there’s a hidden layer of information.” The hidden layer contains epigenetic information that helps explain how cells with the same DNA sequence can function