The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and South Korea-based AI community Pseudo Lab brought tourism and hospitality researchers together with working AI practitioners in a September 18 forum focused on applied projects rather than model demonstrations alone.

The AI for Smart Hospitality, Tourism & Culture forum was organized by PolyU’s Research Centre for Digital Transformation of Tourism and School of Hotel and Tourism Management with Pseudo Lab.

Research and industry sessions share the program

The event brought together academics, students and practitioners from Hong Kong and South Korea. Pseudo Lab participants included people whose professional backgrounds span NVIDIA Korea, KRAFTON, Myrealtrip, Shinhan DS and HDC LABS, according to PolyU.

Industry-oriented sessions covered areas including AI translation, visual-content generation and tourism trends, while research discussions looked at subjects such as causal inference, generative AI in online reviews and restaurant-survival prediction.

Prof. Wangoo Lee of PolyU SHTM and Chanran Kim, founder of Pseudo Lab, co-hosted the program. PolyU described the objective as creating more direct interaction between researchers with domain knowledge and technical practitioners who can help turn research questions into applied projects.

Applied AI depends on domain context

Hospitality and tourism provide a useful test bed for that kind of collaboration because many AI use cases depend heavily on local context, customer behavior and operational data. A technically capable model still needs a clearly defined problem, relevant data and a way to measure whether the result improves an actual workflow.

The forum did not announce a commercial product, funding round or formal research program. Its significance is more modest: it creates a cross-border channel through which domain researchers and AI practitioners can define projects earlier and test whether proposed applications are useful outside a demonstration setting.

Featured image: PolyU

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