Mrs. Yvonne Woo and all members of Prof. Woo’s family who are here with us today, Council and Court members, Distinguished Guests, Friends, Colleagues, Students, Ladies and Gentlemen,

We gather today with heavy hearts, yet with profound gratitude, to honor and celebrate the life and legacy of President Prof. Woo Chia-Wei, our founding president. 

Prof. Woo was a truly remarkable individual—a brilliant scientist, a highly respected educator, a masterful university administrator, an outstanding community leader, and the visionary behind Hong Kong’s first research-focused, innovation-driven university—the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

Born in Shanghai in 1937, Prof. Woo’s childhood was marked by wars, with his family moving between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He arrived in the United States in 1955, a stranger in a strange land. Through perseverance, he earned both MA and PhD degrees at Washington University in St. Louis before pursuing postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). 

Prof. Woo began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, initially envisioning a path solely as a college professor. However, his exceptional leadership and unique insights quickly distinguished him. Within just five years, he was promoted to full professor and appointed Department Head the following year, breaking through the "glass ceiling" in academia of that era. Concurrently, driven by his passion for education, he excelled as a university administrator, and in 1979, he was appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the UCSD. In 1983, at the age of only 45, he made history by becoming president of San Francisco State University, the first Chinese American to head a major US university. 

But then in 1986, after more than three decades in the US and at the peak of his career, Prof. Woo made a bold decision to return to Hong Kong. Inspired by the Hong Kong government’s initiative to establish a new university, he joined the university’s planning committee to bring this mission forward. He later revealed in his memoirs that none of his four children supported his decision to return to Hong Kong. His wife Yvonne asked him two critical questions—“Will HKUST find a more suitable Founding President than you?” and “Will you regret giving up this opportunity 20 years later?”—The answers were clear.

Prof. Woo envisioned a world-class research university that would ignite intellectual growth, drive innovation, and elevate Hong Kong’s standing on the global stage. Anyone would have thought this to be an impossible task. But Prof. Woo was undeterred. With his unwavering determination and persuasive charm, he convinced some of the brightest minds in academia to join him. 

Together, these founding members worked tirelessly to secure funding, forge partnerships with government organizations and business leaders, and recruit top talent. Driven by his mantra of "Creating, not replicating", Prof. Woo meticulously planned every aspect of the institution from scratch, including the strategic direction, curriculum structure, emblem, campus facilities, and governance framework. He saw this as a rare opportunity to build a pioneering institution from the ground up, with innovative curricula and forward-looking research agenda.

HKUST opened its doors in 1991, three years earlier than planned, with Prof. Woo serving as the founding president. I joined the University in 1993 and had the privilege of working with him for eight years until his retirement in 2001. I was inspired by his courage and determination, and his passion for learning. He taught me a great deal about leadership and building institutional excellence. He was adamant about hiring only top-notch academic staff, insisting that only first-class faculty could cultivate first-class talent. This unwavering principle has been vital in propelling HKUST into a world-class university in just three decades. 

As we built the foundations for academic and research excellence, Prof. Woo expanded his vision to the Mainland. He saw HKUST not only as Hong Kong’s first research university, but also as a pioneering institute in China. Today, we are all familiar with the Greater Bay Area. But more than 30 years ago, Prof. Woo had already envisioned a “Hong Kong Bay Area”. He championed cooperation between Hong Kong and Shenzhen and foresaw their greater integration. 

His unparalleled vision led to the establishment of the PKU-HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institution in the Shenzhen Hi-Tech Zone in 1999, a remarkable partnership between HKUST, Peking University, and the Shenzhen Municipal government. This historic endeavor marked a breakthrough in collaborative ties between Hong Kong and the Mainland. In October 2000, I accompanied him on his visits to the University of California, San Francisco, and Washington University in St. Louis to gain valuable insights for strategic planning of setting up a SHENZHEN-PKU-HKUST Medical Center Shenzhen and it became a reality the following year. 

In my over three decades at HKUST, I've had the privilege to witness the profound impact of Prof. Woo's foresight. He set the University on a trajectory that has led to its rapid development into an internationally recognized, top ranked, world-class university. As we mourn his passing, we can take comfort in knowing that his legacy will continue to flourish. His examples of service, perseverance, pursuit of excellence, and intellectual curiosity form the basis of our university core values. The culture he fostered continues to drive us forward, inspiring us to push boundaries, to innovate, and to strive for excellence in all that we do. 

And as we celebrate his achievements, we also honor the man he was—a humanist, a man of integrity, a selfless soul who gave generously to others, an inspiring leader who empowered those around him, and above all, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather. 

I have many fond memories of Prof. Woo. A particularly cherished one is when he presented me the 30-year long service award at the presentation ceremony in April last year. The warmth of his smile and his heartfelt words were a reflection of the deep personal connection he shared with our university community. Prof. Woo always maintained that people were the heart of our success and the University’s greatest asset, and he was dedicated to creating a vibrant environment where everyone could excel. This is a conviction I too hold dear.

Thank you, Prof. Woo. We are profoundly grateful for your pioneering spirit, compassionate leadership, dedicated service, and transformative contributions. You will be deeply missed, but your legacy lives on in the very spirit of HKUST.

Mrs. Woo asked me to convey her heartfelt gratitude to all of you for your outpour of love and support to the family during this very difficult time. On behalf of the entire HKUST community, I offer my heartfelt condolences to Prof. Woo’s family. We stand with you in this time of sorrow, offering our support and deepest sympathy. Thank you.
 

I lost my father this month and finding words has never been so hard.

My role model and an incredible inspiration, Prof. Chia-Wei WOO was a man of great heart and also of great accomplishments. His legacy of contributions to humanity are attested by numerous accolades worldwide, including Commander of the British Empire (CBE), Gold Bauhinia Star (GBS), the French knighthood (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur), and the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

Even before coming to found HKUST, my father was the first Chinese-American to head a major US university, appointed in 1983 as President of San Francisco State University and eventually earning “the key” to San Francisco from its mayor.

Born in Shanghai on November 13, 1937 and later graduating here from Pui Ching Middle School at the top of his year, he was offered a scholarship to Georgetown College in Kentucky at age 17. Even having gone to the US with almost zero English, it took him just one year to earn his Bachelors, with a double major. They’d never seen anything like him. He could’ve been from Mars.

He would later entertain us with stories of being encircled by the Kentucky locals staring at him up and down. Someone would slowly venture: “Ya ain’t black..!” My father would agree, “Nope, not black.” More moments would pass. “Ya ain’t white..?” “Nope,” my father would confirm, “not white.” Finally someone would voice the question: “Well, then… what’re ya?”

I think it was there that building bridges between cultures became his lifelong mission. My father would take us on road trips every year, crisscrossing almost every state and spending months absorbing vastly different subcultures. He vastly expanded our horizons taking us to see Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China in the 1970s. He insisted we eat food from all over the world, giving us the amazing gift of loving the food of many different cultures (even though we discovered many years later that he himself secretly didn’t actually enjoy many of them).

My father went on to earn his PhD in theoretical physics from Washington University in St. Louis. He began his academic career in 1966 at Northwestern University where he contributed reams of papers to solid state physics, the many-body problem, and low-temperature physics, and quickly rose to Chair of Physics and Astronomy, before returning to his postdoctoral University of California San Diego in 1979 to serve as Provost at Revelle College championing its liberal arts Renaissance education.

In 1988, he was recruited by Hong Kong’s then British government in a tremendously ambitious plan to found the first American-style research university. Starting from scratch amidst a landscape still dotted with shanty towns, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology helped reshape the city and region into a knowledge-based economy through scientific research and inspired youth. My father’s proposal for a “Hong Kong Bay Area” laid the groundwork for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

In 1991, finishing my PhD on AI at Berkeley, I passed over many other international opportunities to stand with him as one of 400 founding wave professors of Hong Kong UST. In those early days, the university even had to build the region’s first internet service provider, first digital library, and many other firsts. Today HKUST is ranked among the world’s top universities by all accounts.

My father’s memoirs—洋墨水 (age 17–28), 紅墨水 (age 28–41), 玻璃天花板 (age 41–50), and 同創香港科技大學 (age 50 on)—reveal his clear visionary foresight and dedication to doing the right thing, even when the conventional wisdom surrounding him was advising against it. His inspiring adherence to this principle demonstrates what it takes to be a true trailblazer. His mantra “create, don’t replicate” has been my lifelong North Star.

My father—a paragon of education, peace, and humanitarianism—passed onto us an ingrained sense of obligation to seek out the crucial, difficult societal problems that others might not otherwise tackle.

As a family we stand firm for his Renaissance ideals, his care for those less fortunate, and his determination to build bridges between cultures.

Despite his massive accomplishments and fame, my father always remained humble, approachable, and down to earth, never forgetting his poor immigrant roots and war torn childhood. He happily lived a simple life with the love of his life and his rock, my mother Yvonne. The first of us children were born in a prefabricated trailer home in St. Louis. We grew up clipping discount coupons in a largely blue-collar neighborhood in Chicago. To the very end he excitedly delighted in every delicious bargain HKD30 Chinese fast food meal, chatting with nearby restaurant patrons.

No matter who we were around, from whatever socioeconomic class or cultural background, my father constantly reminded us, “there but for the grace of God go I.” He never let us forget that the most important achievement in life is to do our utmost to take care of all the humans on this planet. He held high standards but detested bullies, always teaching us that if you happen to be more fortunate, then your job is to help those less so.

He championed empiricism and rationality in everything he said and did. When I was seven on a bike ride with my father, he pulled us over onto a sidewalk bench for a break. He asked me what color car I thought was most common, and I guessed blue. Fine, he said, I’ll pick white. We spent five minutes or so counting passing cars (it turned out I was right). My father then used this to teach me the basics of statistics and estimating probabilities.

Fourteen years later, my father’s example would give me the fortitude and the confidence to stand my ground against my Berkeley PhD advisor and almost the entire AI establishment, arguing in my dissertation that the dominant rule-based AI paradigm built on boolean logic would never be enough to handle human language and intelligence—that instead, statistical approaches like machine learning and neural networks would be the breakthrough in AI.

That later enabled me to invent the web’s first global translator built on radically new language models, which spawned Google, Microsoft, and Baidu translate.

One of the other early lessons my father instilled—through growing up among physicists and regularly getting brought along to places like Fermilab at Argonne National Laboratory—is the existential danger of weaponization that accompanies the technological benefits. My father championed the Renaissance ideal of education because scientists and engineers cannot be safely divorced from humanities, social sciences, and the arts. No knowledge can be practiced without ethics.

His great legacy of bridge building from Chicago to California to Hong Kong, to carry forth the advancement and sharing of human knowledge across societies, inspires me every day. Even now—as I put the final touches on my book Raising AI to drive public conversation on the existential danger of AI-driven polarization, fearmongering, hatemongering, demonization, and information disorder—I am inspired by my father’s values to protect humanity by ensuring science is used for peaceful means.

Ten years ago I had an Oppenheimer moment seeing how the natural language processing and machine learning tech that scientists like myself helped pioneer—with the aim of helping everyone better understand facts, and better understand each other—was instead powering AI algorithms on social media, newsfeeds, chatbots, recommendation and search engines, in ways that are dangerously driving people toward misunderstanding and hatred.

It was my father’s example that told me what I needed to do now.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said: Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. 

Thank you for all you taught us, 爸爸. We will do all we can to continue your values of humanitarianism and peace through teaching as many humans as possible. 

With the grace of God so go we too now, 爸爸.