Professor Yilei Shao
Dean of Shanghai AI-Finance School (SAIFS),
East China Normal University
Director, SAIFS Research Center & Innovation Center,
East China Normal University
Director, United Nations University (UNU) Hub in AI-Finance at ECNU
Professor Yilei Shao, Founding Dean of Shanghai AI-Finance School (SAIFS) and SAIFS Research Center at ECNU, Director of UNU-ECNU Hub in AI-Finance at ECNU, holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Princeton University. She was the former Secretary General of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) China Office from 2021 to 2023. In her previous experience, she has worked at Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in New York.As a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, she not only focuses on the application of AI in the financial sector but also actively explores its innovative integration into education and the arts, while deeply engaging with frontier issues such as AI governance and ethics. In 2025, she pioneered the concept of “Silicon Economy,” aiming to explore both theoretically and quantitatively how intelligence transforms productivity and reshapes the global political and economic system.
