吳德愷〈我的父親吳家瑋 我一生的北極星〉英文原文 (16:16)

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

My role model and an incredible inspiration, Professor 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 1968 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.