Hung-yi Lee

Professor, National Taiwan University

About

Hung-yi Lee (李宏毅) is a professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Electrical Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science & Information Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. from NTU in 2012, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Academia Sinica and a visiting scientist position at MIT CSAIL. His research focuses on machine learning, speech processing, and human-machine interaction. He is widely known across the Chinese-speaking world for his free YouTube lecture series on machine learning and generative AI, which have attracted millions of views and earned him the nickname 'the Pokémon Master of ML' for his use of anime examples to explain complex concepts.

Key Contributions

Built one of the Chinese-speaking world's most important open machine-learning curricula through freely available NTU lectures
Uses anime, games, and pop-culture examples to make deep learning, speech, and generative AI less intimidating without removing the math
Researches speech processing, spoken language understanding, and unsupervised or weakly supervised ASR
Keeps updating courses as the field shifts, connecting classical ML foundations with transformers, LLMs, and generative AI practice
Trains Taiwan's AI talent pipeline at scale by combining NTU courses, public videos, talks, and practical assignments
His teaching style is unusually accessible, though its popularity can sometimes overshadow his technical research contributions