Jian Yang
Beijing Normal – Hong Kong Baptist University
This talk examines the shift of AI design and operation from isolated intelligent functions to AI agents, agentic systems, and ultimately agentic enterprises. It proposes a three-tier practice model centred on data and knowledge, understanding, and cognition-based action, and argues that enterprise agentic practice requires more than adding agents to existing workflows: it demands new approaches to digital memory, context handling, world models, governance, observability, and agent lifecycle management. Through case studies of agent architectures, tool-using agents, software engineering agents, workflow agents, and enterprise agent ecosystems, the talk discusses both the opportunities and risks of deploying agents in complex enterprise data ecosystems. It highlights the relevance of world models as executable representations of enterprise service worlds, enabling agents to reason about states, simulate consequences, manage uncertainty, and act within operational and policy constraints. The keynote further positions service computing as a critical foundation for building accountable, composable, trustworthy, and evolvable agentic service ecosystems.
Speaker Biography
Prof. Jian Yang is Chair Professor, Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University. Before she joined BNBU, she was the inaugural Director of Macquarie University Data Horizons research centre, the Deputy Director of Applied AI research centre at Macquarie University, and the Director of Industry PhD program at Australian Digital Finance Collaborative Research Centre (DFCRC). Before she joined Macquarie University, she worked as an associate professor at Tilburg University, Netherlands, a senior research scientist at CSIRO, Australia, and as a lecturer at University of New South Wales (Canberra).
She was one of the early researchers working in service computing including founding the ICSOC conference. She has published over 300 articles in top data science and service computing venues such as TKDE, TSC, TNNIS, VLDBJ, KDD, VLDB, ICDE, IJCAI, NeurIPS, CVPR, ACL, WWW, ICWS, ICSOC, etc, and won varies best paper awards. She has been leading the research centres to focus on cross-disciplinary and translational research and attracting funding from diverse sources including industry and government agencies.