People

Prof Calvin WONG
PhD
                    Cheng Yik Hung Professor in Fashion,
                    School of Fashion and Textiles,
            The Hong Kong Polytechnic University



        Centre Director, AiDLab

Prof. Calvin Wong is currently the Centre Director of Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design (AiDLab), a research platform established by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and Royal College of Art (RCA) in the UK, and is funded by the HKSAR Government under the InnoHK Research Clusters. Calvin’s leading role brings together cutting-edge research by practitioners and scholars of both institutions to establish a new AI creative innovation cluster in the region.


Calvin is a trailblazer in the application of AI innovations within the context of the fashion industry for design, manufacturing, and retail. Ranked among the world's top 2% of most-cited scientists in the field of “Artificial intelligence & Image Processing”, he has been bridging academia and industry with his cutting-edge research since 2010. Calvin and his team are building new intelligent systems to disrupt the fashion industry. In 2022, he has developed the world’s first designer-led AI system, named “AI based Interactive Design Assistant for Fashion” system (AiDA). AiDA is embedded with AI based image recognition, detection, and generation technologies. It assists the designer to streamline their creative process and facilitates their inspiration by automatically generating original collections based on their unique inspirations and thus speeds up ideation. A “FASHION X AI” show at M+ Museum Hong Kong showcased 80 outfits to demonstrate the outcomes of international fashion brand and designers working with AiDA and attracted over 120 local and international media coverage, including VOGUE, BBC News, The Times, MIT Technology Review, etc. AiDA being featured in WGSN Big Ideas Report 2025 (Fashion) demonstrates its’ influential role in the future development of fashion industry.

In 2019, his worked with Alibaba Group to establish the first-of-its-kind “Fashion AI Dataset”, which improves the accuracy of online searches for fashion images impacting the shopping experiences of millions of users on the platform.

Calvin was recognised as one of the Ten New Innovators by the Fashion for Good Global Initiative 2021. His inventions have received numerous accolades including two Grand Awards and a Gold Medal with the Congratulations at the 47th International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva. Calvin’s work has been extensively featured in the media such as Associated Press, Televisión Española, TV Tokyo and MediaCorp Singapore.

With a passion to bring research into real world contexts, his success in AI applications is supported by his work derived from his publications of more than 160 high impact journals in SCI journals including influential publications such as IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, etc. Calvin is frequently invited to deliver plenary, and keynote presentations and chaired the world’s first conference on the integration of fashion and artificial intelligence, the “Artificial Intelligence on Fashion and Textile International Conference 2018” (co-organised by the Alibaba Group and the UK's Textile Institute), and the 12th International Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) 2023.