Executive Directors歷屆執行長
The Executive Director is elected by the department faculty. Since the founding regulations were passed in 2020, three directors have carried the Center from institutional founding to the full development of courses, communities, and international research.
1st Executive Director ・ 2020 – 2021
Chung-Yang Yeh
Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Soochow University ・ Chung-Yang Yeh, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton (UK); M.A. in Social Welfare, National Chung Cheng University; B.A. in Social Policy and Social Work, National Chi Nan University. Formerly Assistant Professor of Social Work at Asia University and postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica; visiting scholar at Nagoya University (2024–2025).
His research works within a "comparative welfare regimes" framework, spanning East Asian welfare states, pension policy, social investment, welfare attitudes, and poverty and the life course. He follows the rise of welfare marketization, welfare financialization, and the regulatory welfare state, focusing on Taiwan’s policy responses to population decline, aging, and widening inequality. His honors include the MOST New Faculty Research Award (2019) and NCNU Research Excellence Awards (2021, 2023, 2025). He describes his work as "moving between comparison and institutional analysis — data should be verifiable, but society always holds one more layer than the model." Beyond scholarship, he has practiced photography for nearly thirty years.
As Director: Founding-era director. After the regulations passed in January 2020, he built the Center’s institutional foundation and early plans, establishing its "study AI through the social sciences" identity and framing later course and research work. He remains a member and co-convenes the "Frontiers of AI and Welfare in East Asia" faculty community.
→ Personal site: chungyang1017.github.io
2nd Executive Director ・ 2022 – 2024
Yu-Cheng Liu
Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Soochow University ・ Yu-Cheng Liu, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in Sociology and M.A. in Religious Studies, National Chengchi University. Formerly Associate/Assistant Professor of Applied Sociology at Nanhua University, doctoral academic advisor at NCCU’s International College of Innovation, and adjunct assistant professor at NCCU Sociology and NCTU’s Center for General Education.
Specializes in AI, ethnomethodology, systems theory, STS, and social/design thinking — among the first sociologists in Taiwan to study AI systematically. His recent work centers on "AI as a social phenomenon" and the social study of autonomous driving, with more than ten international journal articles on the sociology of AI, privacy practices, the accelerated society, and family systems theory. He teaches sociology, introduction to social design, and social-issues practice, and offers "AI and Sociology" at the Center. In 2026, a cross-disciplinary work led through his NSTC "chip-driven humanities" sub-project — After the Age of 80, created with Pao-Jui Kung (Industrial Design, Shih Chien University) and curator Hsiang-Wen Chen — won the Core77 Design Award in Speculative Design, the only Taiwanese art-design team honored in the category this year, bringing Taiwan's social-issue research and techno-art onto the international stage.
As Director: Moved the Center from framework to full operation — launching its Medium column (rcais.medium.com) as a public-writing platform, bringing courses like "AI and Sociology" into the curriculum, and opening ethnomethodological research on human–machine interaction and autonomous driving that shaped the Center’s "AI as a social phenomenon" approach.
→ Department profile: Soochow Sociology — Yu-Cheng Liu
3rd Executive Director ・ 2025 – present
Fang-Yi Huang
Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of Personnel Office, Soochow University ・ Fang-Yi Huang, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in Sociology, University of Florida; Ph.D. candidate in Crime Prevention, National Chung Cheng University; M.Ed. and double B.A. in History/Education, National Taiwan Normal University. Formerly Assistant Professor at Yuan Ze University and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. She is Secretary-General of IPSA Research Committee 25 (Politics of Health Policy) and Associate Editor of Health Politics, and received the 2025 Rader Young Scholar Award from the Soochow University Friendship Foundation.
Her research spans medical sociology, welfare legislation and social policy, and gender studies, focusing on gender gaps in pensions and the old-age economic security of non-standard workers and older women, extending to AI’s impact on social welfare. She teaches "AI in Criminology" and the cross-college "AI for Social Good," and uses microsimulation to turn her research into the public-facing Taiwan–Japan–Korea pension calculator and documentary animation.
As Director: Expanded the Center across the board — 15 lectures in a single semester; co-convening the "Frontiers of AI and Welfare in East Asia" community and driving the draft "White Paper on Social-Security Policy in the Age of AI"; joining Yonsei University’s six-country "triple transition" research; coordinating the high-school AI summer camp; and being selected as a participating teacher in the MOE Digital Humanities Innovation and Humanities-AI pilot programs.
→ Personal site: voyage213.github.io (About ・ Research ・ Publications ・ Teaching)