Professor Zhang Jiji

Professor Zhang Jiji is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined the university in 2023, having taught previously at California Institute of Technology, Lingnan University, and Hong Kong Baptist University. 

Initially trained as a student of logic at Peking University, Professor Zhang's research interests shifted to philosophy of science and formal epistemology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his PhD. He is inclined to pursue exact and formal approaches in philosophical research, and his research has multiple points of contact with other disciplines such as computer science and statistics. The key questions that motivate his primary research programme concern the extent to which information about cause and effect can be reliably inferred from observations and the extent to which such inferred causal information can effectively guide hypothetical reasoning and decision-making. These epistemological and logical questions are also related to important issues in the metaphysics of causation, as well as to knowledge representation and learning in artificial intelligence. Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature of his research, Professor Zhang's work has appeared both in premier journals of philosophy and in leading venues of artificial intelligence.