Asia Faculty Summit 2014

P. Anandan has been the managing director of Microsoft Research India since its inception in 2005. Since June 1997, before being named managing director of Microsoft Research India, Anandan was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where he built one of the world’s strongest research teams in computer vision and video processing. During that time, he also served as an ambassador for the Microsoft Research University Relations program in India and helped develop strong relationships between Indian universities and Microsoft Research. He has represented Microsoft in meetings with the government of India to emphasize the company’s commitment to research and development. He was part of the working group constituted by the 12th Planning Commission to make recommendations on India’s Higher Education Policy. Anandan continues Microsoft Research’s ongoing relationships with the government and academic communities in his new role.

Before joining Microsoft, Anandan was an assistant professor of computer science for four years at Yale University. Following this, he was a research manager at Sarnoff Corp, Princeton, NJ. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which presented him with a Distinguished Alumni award in 2006. He also attended the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he received his Master of Science degree in computer science, and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He received the Distinguished Alumni award from IIT Madras in 2010, and was inducted into the “Hall of Computing” by the University of Nebraska in 2010. Anandan is currently on the Board of Governors of IIT Madras.

Judith Bishop is director of Computer Science at Microsoft Research. Her role is to create strong links between Microsoft’s research groups and universities globally, through encouraging projects, supporting conferences, and engaging directly in research. Her expertise is in programming languages and mobile computing, with a strong practical bias. Her current projects are TouchDevelop and Code Hunt, and she worked previously on TryF#. She received her PhD from the University of Southampton and was a professor in South Africa for many years, with visiting positions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Italy, and the United States. She was general co-chair of ICSE 2010 and co-chair of several Microsoft Research summits and serves frequently on editorial, program, and award committees. She has written 16 books on programming, which have been translated into six languages. Her awards include the IFIP Silver Core and Outstanding Service Award (2006) and the South Africa’s Distinguished Woman Scientist of the Year (2005).

Dr. Jining Chen is professor of Environmental System Analysis, Tsinghua University. Dr. Chen received his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University’s Department of Environmental Engineering in 1986 and earned his Ph.D. from Imperial College London in 1993. He became a research associate at Imperial College London in 1994. He joined the staff of Tsinghua University in 1998 as vice dean of the Department of Environmental Engineering and became dean of the department in 1999. Dr. Chen was appointed vice president of Tsinghua University in 2006 and became executive president of Tsinghua in 2007. Dr. Chen was appointed president of Tsinghua University in January 2012.

Dr. Chen is currently a member of the National Environmental Advisory Commission, deputy chair of the Science and Technology Committee of MEP, vice president of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, and board member of the Chinese Environmental Foundation. He is also a member of many other scientific committees, professional associations, and advisory councils related to water, environment, and education.

Winnie Cui is a senior university relation manager at Microsoft Research Asia. She is responsible for creating links and building long-term and mutually beneficial collaboration and partnership between Microsoft Research and universities in Asia. She engages with academics to identify high-impact research areas and work with universities on talent development programs. Winnie started her career in the Internet industry in the United States after obtaining her M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Memphis. She joined GE Healthcare as an international leader to manage a team spanning in Asia and Europe on the digitization excellence for go-to-market applications and programs. She also served as a regional head and initiated a partner collaboration mechanism in Hong Kong when she worked in the consulting industry on Customer Relationship Management. Winnie joined Microsoft in 2006 as the China IT Manager in the Information Technology group, responsible for accelerating Microsoft’s state-of-the-art technologies in the Greater China region, as well as for helping industrial partners benefit from cutting-edge technologies.

Darren Edge is a lead researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Microsoft Research Asia, based in Beijing, China. His 2008 PhD dissertation was the first work to explore the concept of “peripheral interaction” with objects on the boundary of the user’s attention, and much of his ongoing research aims to facilitate similarly lightweight, episodic engagement with activities of significant personal and social value. In his work to date, this has led him to explore how technology can support learning and communication across a variety of domains, resulting in award-winning papers in the areas of mobile micro-learning (Best Paper and Honorable Mention at MobileHCI’12), social exertion gaming (Honorable Mention at CHI’12), and presentation authoring (two Honorable Mentions at CHI’14; one at MobileHCI’14). He holds a BA in Computer Science and Management Studies and a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, both from the University of Cambridge.

Bin Gao is a lead researcher in Internet Economics and Computational Advertising Group (IECA), Microsoft Research. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, and computational advertising. He has authored two book chapters, 30 papers in top conferences and journals, and over 20 granted or pending patents. He co-authored the best student paper at SIGIR (2008). He serves as PC for SIGIR (2009–2014), WWW (2011–2013), and senior PC for CIKM (2011). He is a reviewer for TKDE, TIST, PRL, IRJ, and others. He is a tutorial speaker at WWW (2011) and SIGIR (2012). He is a workshop organizer at ICDM (2012), SIGIR (2013), KDD (2013), and ICML (2014). Prior to joining Microsoft, he got his Ph.D. degree from School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, and got his bachelor degree from the School of Mathematical and System Sciences, Shandong University.

Prof. Peng Gong is the director of the Center for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, and a professor at the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Waterloo in 1990.

He has published more than 300 papers and edited seven books. His achievements in remote sensing image processing, analysis and application, GIS theory, techniques and application, and global change studies have been acknowledged both nationally and internationally by the receipt of numerous awards, including Overseas Assessor (1999, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Distinguished Young Scientist Award (1998, NSF China), the Talbert Abrams Grand Award from ASPRS for Best Paper in Photogrammetry (1994), the ASPRS ERDAS Award for Best Scientific Paper in Remote Sensing (1993), and the John I. Davidson ASPRS President’s Award for Practical Papers (1993).

Dr. Baining Guo is assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, where he also leads the graphics lab. Prior to joining Microsoft Research in 1999, he was a senior staff researcher with the Microcomputer Research Labs of Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California. Dr. Guo graduated from Beijing University with B.S. in mathematics. He received his M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1989 and 1991 respectively. Dr. Guo is a fellow of IEEE.

Dr. Guo’s research interests include computer graphics, visualization, and natural user interface. A focus of his work is data-driven techniques for texture and reflectance modeling, particularly techniques for studying light transmission and reflection in complex materials and environments through the discovery of coherent structures in large-scale, high-dimensional image data. He also worked on real-time rendering, geometry modeling, and gesture recognition (for Kinect natural user interface). Dr. Guo was on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2006–2010) and Computer and Graphics (2007–2011). He is currently an associate editor of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. He is serving as the papers chair for the 2014 ACM SIGGRAPH Asia conference. He has been on the program committees of numerous conferences in graphics and visualization, including ACM SIGGRAPH and IEEE Visualization. Dr. Guo holds over 50 US patents.

Shi Han is a lead researcher in the Software Analytics group at Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include data-driven software analysis, machine learning, and large-scale computing platform. Incorporating expertise from these domains, he has been pursuing research on performance analysis for large-scale system software. Since 2009, he has been the key contributor to StackMine—a scalable stack-trace mining platform for Windows performance debugging in the large. Prior to 2009, he was a key contributor to the research and development of the HMM-based East Asian language handwriting recognition engine in Windows 7. He received his BS and MS in computer science from Zhejiang University in 2003 and 2006 respectively.

Junsheng is the founder and CTO of Shanghai Yungoal Info Tech Co., Ltd. (Yungoal). He has more than 10 years’ experience in software development, project management, and running start-ups.

Junsheng was with Microsoft for approximately seven years. He worked in CSS and R&D on VB support, System Center Configuration Manager, Commerce Transaction Platform, and other projects. He was also founder and software designer of Prismlab, which manufactured machines for digital photo processing and finishing.

Junsheng devoted himself to the public cloud industry starting in 2012. His team contributed to some projects of public cloud in Asia. He is also a trainer for Microsoft Azure for Research, Azure University, and Azure Partner Readiness.

Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is the chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group, and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. Dr. Hon oversees Microsoft’s research and development activities as well as collaborations with academia in Asia Pacific.

An IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished Scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. He serves on the editorial board of the international journal, Communications of the ACM. Dr. Hon has published more than 100 technical papers in international journals and at conferences. He co-authored a book, Spoken Language Processing, which is a graduate-level textbook and reference book in the area of speech technology used in many universities all over the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozen patents in several technical areas.

Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as a deputy-managing director, and was promoted to managing director in 2007. In 2014, Dr. Hon was appointed as chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group. In addition, he founded and managed the Microsoft Search Technology Center (STC) from 2005 to 2007 and led development of the Microsoft internet Search product (Bing) in Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Hon was the founding member and architect of the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. Besides overseeing all architectural and technical aspects of the award winning Microsoft Speech Server product, Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he is also responsible for managing and delivering statistical learning technologies and advanced search. Dr. Hon joined Microsoft Research as a senior researcher in 1995 and has been a key contributor to Microsoft’s SAPI and speech engine technologies. He previously worked at Apple Computer, where he led research and development for Apple’s Chinese Dictation Kit.

Dr. Hon received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.

Dr. Qiang Huo is a principal researcher and research manager of Speech Group at Microsoft Research Asia. Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia in August 2007, Qiang had been a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) since 1998. From 1995 to 1997, he worked at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute), Kyoto, Japan. From 1991 to 1994, he did his Ph.D. research at HKU. In the past 25 years, he has been doing research and making fundamental contributions in the areas of speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, gesture recognition, biometric-based user authentication, hardware design for speech and image processing. Qiang received the B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 1987, the M.Eng. degree from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree from the USTC, in 1994, all in electrical engineering.

Kap-Young Jeong, Ph.D., is an economist with expertise in the fields of industrial organization, public policy, and East Asian economy, as well as a visionary educator and education administrator.

After graduating from Yonsei University, Kap-Young Jeong obtained his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his doctoral degree in Economics from Cornell University. Since becoming a professor at Yonsei University in 1986, he has focused his research on areas of industrial organization, public policy, and East Asian economy.

For his research accomplishments in economics, he has been listed in the Marquis Who’s Who in the World and has received a wide range of awards such as the Dasan Economics Award from Hankyung Economic Daily, as well as the Economist of the Year from Maeil Economic Daily.

Jeong has held a variety of posts, including president of the Korea Academic Society of Industrial Organization, president of the Korea Association for Comparative Economics, commissioner of Korea Communications Commission, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Samsung Economics Research Institute, chairman of The Center for Free Enterprise and guest editorial writer for The Dong-A Ilbo. Currently, he is an editor at the Global Economic Review (SSCI Journal, Published by Institute of East and West Studies, Yonsei University). He also serves as member and chair of the Policy Planning Committee under the Ministry of Justice, as well as the member of the Macroeconomy and Finance Subcommittee Chairperson under the National Economic Advisory Council.

His major scholarly publications include The Third Capital (2009, Samsung Economic Research Institute), Industrial Organization Theory (2009, Ed. 6, Pakyoungsa), Comparative Analysis of Korea and Japan’s Economic Development and Political Environment (Joint authorship; 2003, Jipmoondang), and many more.

He has shared his economics expertise with public—and even children—by publishing a series of educational books and cartoons including Nine is Greater Than Ten, A Coin for Charon, and Economics Read with Cartoons. He makes regular appearances on a variety of television shows such as Economics in My Hand at MBC, Economics Focus at KBS, and TV Column at SBS.

In addition to his profession as an economist, Professor Kap-Young Jeong has demonstrated outstanding capabilities as an educational administrator. At Yonsei University, he has held various posts such as the dean of Academic Affairs, dean of the Graduate School of Information, and senior vice president of Wonju Campus. He has served as president of Yonsei University since February 2012.

Hiroyuki Kajimoto is associate professor at the University of Electro-Communications, Japan. He also serves as a researcher for the Japan Science and Technology Agency. He earned his bachelor degree in mathematical engineering in 1998 and received a PhD in information science and technology in 2006 from The University of Tokyo. He was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2001 to 2003, and was assistant professor of the University of Tokyo from 2003 to 2006.

His research interests include tactile displays, tactile sensors, electrical nerve stimulation, human computer interaction, welfare devices, and virtual reality. He has published over 100 papers for international conferences such as IEEE Haptics Symposium, EuroHaptics, and Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and for peer-reviewed journals such as IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Haptics. He was a founding member of IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics and is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Takeo Kanade is the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics. He received his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001, and a founding director of Quality of Life Technology Research Center from 2006 to 2012. In Japan, he founded the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo and served as the founding director from 2001 to 2010.

Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics, and sensors. He has written more than 300 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and also to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, a Founding Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the former and founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision. The awards he has received include the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, Okawa Award, C&C Award, ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, Joseph Engelberger Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, FIT Accomplishment Award, and IEEE PAMI-TC Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award.

Noboru (Sean) Kuno is a university relations manager at Microsoft Research Asia. He is based in Tokyo and he is in charge of Microsoft Research academic collaboration in Japan. Kuno leads the Mt. Fuji Plan, a comprehensive program that works to encourage collaboration between academia in Japan and Microsoft Research. The program is organized around four pillars: Research Collaboration, Talent Fostering, Academic Exchanges, and Curriculum Innovation. Kuno is responsible for the entire program strategy, planning, and operation to engage with universities, research institutes, and government agencies. Kuno joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2009. Before he joined Microsoft, he worked for the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), the second largest funding agency in Japan, where he acquired more than four years’ experience of project funding, program management, and promotion of basic science research projects and academic exchange events. Before JST, he worked as a manager of marketing and product & business development in the cable and satellite industry in Japan. He received a bachelor degree (1996) and a master’s degree (1998) in Quantum Engineering and Systems Science from the Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo.

Butler Lampson is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an adjunct professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was on the faculty at Berkeley and then at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and at Digital’s Systems Research Center. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, WHSIWYG editors, and tablet computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, the SDSI/SPKI system for network security, the Microsoft Tablet PC software, the Microsoft Palladium high-assurance stack, and several programming languages.

He received an AB from Harvard University, a PhD in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, and honorary ScDs from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich and the University of Bologna. He holds a number of patents on networks, security, raster printing, and transaction processing. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996, the National Computer Systems Security Award in 1998, the IEEE von Neumann Medal in 2001, the Turing Award in 1992, and the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize in 2004.

At Microsoft, he has worked on anti-piracy, security, fault-tolerance, and user interfaces. He was one of the designers of Palladium, and spent two years as an architect in the Tablet PC group. Currently he is in Microsoft Research, working on security, privacy, and fault-tolerance, and kibitzing in systems, networking, and other areas.

Professor Hyunju Lee is currently an associate professor of GIST. She received B.S. degree from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejon, Korea, in 1997; M.S. degree from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1999; and Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California, United States in 2006. She have served as a faculty member at the School of Information and Communications of GIST since 2007. Prior to joining GIST, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Harvard Medical School from 2006 to 2007.

Lee’s research interests include data mining, bioinformatics, cancer genetics, and text mining, and she has published highly-cited papers in international journals. She has been developing novel data mining methods for diverse areas—from the Internet to life science. Currently, she is building a search engine for cancer researchers and integrative algorithms for revealing new biomarkers for various diseases.

Miran Lee is a principal research program manager of Microsoft Research Outreach Group at Microsoft Research responsible for academic collaboration in Korea and Asia-Pacific region.

Lee joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2005 as university relations manager to build long-term and mutually beneficial relations with academia. She is based in Korea, where she engages with leading research universities, research institutes, and relevant government agencies. She establishes strategies and directions, identifies business opportunities, designs various programs and projects, and manages budget. She works with students, researchers, faculty members, and university administrators to build strong partnerships, and works closely with the research groups at Microsoft Research, focusing on research collaboration, curriculum development, talent fostering, and academic exchanges. She has successfully run a number of global and regional programs such as Gaming & Graphics, Web-Scale NLP, Machine Translation, eHealth, SORA (Software Radio), Kinect, and Microsoft Azure for Research.

Prior to her current role, Miran Lee co-founded Smart Systems, which specializes in IT outsourcing services in Illinois, United States. As CEO of Smart Systems, she successfully led the business with more than 100 percentage annual growth. From 1993 to 2002, she worked at British Telecom Korea in various positions ranging from systems engineer to account director to vice president. Lee also worked at Samsung SDS, where she was responsible for International VAN (Value Added Network) businesses and led the International VAN business team. She started her business career as a system developer at General Electric Information Services, where she developed email, EDI, and in-house applications.

Miran Lee was an adjunct professor in the Telecommunication Department at Anyang University for two years (2001–2002) and she earned her MS in Engineering from Ewha Womans University.

Sangyoun Lee is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Yonsei University. He received his BS and MS degrees from Yonsei University. After he completed his MS, he started to work for Korea Telecom (KT). During this time, he completed his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. At KT, he focused on multimedia standards development, especially on MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group: ISO/IEC SC29/WG11). Some of his proposals on MPEG-7 area were adopted as the international standard. From 2004, he moved to Yonsei University as a faculty member in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He also became a faculty researcher at BERC (Biometric Engineering Research Center), focusing on biometric technology (fingerprint, iris, face, and speech). He was vice director of the center from 2004 to 2011. At the center, he worked on 2D/3D face recognition and modeling. He also worked with KIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology) to develop a 3D montage system. This system is the first approach in the world that extends 2D montage to 3D montage for more reliable and robust montage generation. He has also worked with many mobile, TV, and car companies—including Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Pantech—on computer vision applications.

Dr. Shipeng Li joined and helped to found Microsoft Research’s Beijing lab in May 1999. His research interests include multimedia processing, analysis, coding, streaming, networking, and communications. From Oct. 1996 to May 1999, Dr. Li was with Sarnoff Corporation. Dr. Li has been actively involved in research and development in broad multimedia areas and international standards. He has authored and co-authored six books/book chapters and more than 280 referred journal and conference papers. He holds more than 140 granted US patents.

Dr. Li received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering (EE) from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in EE from Lehigh University in 1996. He was a faculty member at USTC in 1991–1992. Dr. Li is a fellow of IEEE. He is now serving as deputy editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

Victor O.K. Li received SB, SM, EE and ScD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1981, respectively. He is chair professor of Information Engineering, and head of the department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He also chairs the Executive Committee of the HKU Initiative on Clean Energy and Environment. He served as associate dean of Engineering, and managing director of Versitech Ltd., the technology transfer and commercial arm of HKU. He has served on the board of China.com Inc., and now serves on the boards of Sunevision Holdings Ltd. and Anxin-China Holdings Ltd., listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Previously, he was professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, United States, and director of the USC Communication Sciences Institute. Sought by government, industry, and academic organizations, Professor Li has lectured and consulted extensively around the world. He has received numerous awards, including the PRC Ministry of Education Changjiang Chair Professorship at Tsinghua University, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Visiting Fellowship in Communications, the Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, and the Order of the Bronze Bauhinia Star, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China. He is a Registered Professional Engineer and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, the IEEE, the IAE, and the HKIE.

Mike joined the Mobile and Sensing Systems (MASS) group in 2011, after he got his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Mike’s research interests center around systems and tools that enable large-scale systems solving problems in mobile and sensing areas.

Kangping Liu is a senior university relations manager at Microsoft Research Asia. In his current role, Kangping works closely with college students, faculty members, and university administrators to build long-term and mutually beneficial collaborations and partnerships between Microsoft Research and academia in Asia. He engages with academics to identify high-impact research topics and works with universities on talent programs. Kangping is the program manager of Microsoft Research Asia’s “Accelerating Urban Informatics with Microsoft Azure” research theme. He also is program manager of the Microsoft Research Asia Faculty Summit 2014.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia in 2010, Kangping worked on technical consulting and business development for IBM and Sun Microsystems. He has been an early advocate of cloud computing in China since 2006 and has been invited to speak at various industry events. Kangping joined GE Global Research Center in Shanghai as a senior engineer after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2002. Kangping also earned his B.S. and M.S. in Electronics Engineering from Xi’an University of Technology in 1994 and 1997 respectively.

Dr. Wei-Ying Ma is an assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia where he oversees multiple research groups including Web Search and Data Mining, Natural Language Computing, and Human Computer Interaction.

Under his leadership, Wei-Ying’s team of researchers has been recognized a global powerhouse in search, data mining, and multimedia information retrieval related research. The team has transferred key technologies into Microsoft’s search and online service products. In addition, the team has published extensively at major conferences such as the SIGIR, WWW, and ACM Multimedia.

Before joining Microsoft in 2001, Wei-Ying was with HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, where he worked in the fields of multimedia adaptation and distributed media services infrastructure. From 1994 to 1997, Wei-Ying was engaged in the Alexandria Digital Library project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During this time, he developed one of the first web-based image-retrieval systems, Netra, which is regarded as one of the most influential image-retrieval systems.

As an active member of the research community, Wei-Ying has published more than 250 papers at international conferences. He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information System and ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. In recent years, he served as program co-chair of WWW 2008, program co-chair of PCM 2007, general co-chair of AIRS 2008, and general co-chair of MMM 2005.

Wei-Ying received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1990. He earned a Master of Science degree and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1994 and 1997, respectively.

Thomas Moscibroda is a senior researcher and founding manager of the System Algorithms (SysAlgo) Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia. He is also the chair professor for Network Science at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Prior to founding the new SysAlgo group, Thomas was a member of the Mobile & Sensing Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia. Before moving to China in 2011, he was a member of the Distributed Systems Research group at Microsoft Research in Redmond for five years, and he was an affiliate member of the Networking Research Group and the Computer Architecture Research group at Microsoft Research Redmond, respectively.

Thomas’ research interests are in (wireless) networking, computer architecture, and distributed systems, with ongoing projects in each of these areas. He has a particular focus on algorithmic and mathematical approaches to practical system design. He obtained his PhD in 2006 from ETH Zurich, and was awarded the ETH Medal for his doctoral thesis. His research is documented in more than 60 research papers, and he has received Best Paper Awards at several top-tier conferences, including IPSN 2007, SIGCOMM 2009, NSDI 2009, ASPLOS 2010, EuroSys 2012, as well as PODC 2004 and 2012. His articles on DRAM scheduling and on-chip networking in multi-core systems were selected as IEEE Micro Top-Pick Computer Architecture papers in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He is also the recipient of the MICS Research on Communications Award by the National Research Foundation of Switzerland (NCCR) for his contributions to the area of Mobile Communications and Information Systems.

Zaiqing Nie is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He leads a research team working on web-scale entity search and knowledge mining. Nie and his team aim at building web-scale Entity Graph through interactive knowledge mining and crowdsourcing, and they have built several web-scale entity search systems including Renlifang, Microsoft Academic Search, and EntityCube. Before joining Microsoft in April 2004, Nie received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2004, a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Applications from Tsinghua University in 1998, and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University from in 1996. His research interests include web search, data mining, crowdsourcing, and machine learning. Nie has many publications in high quality conferences and journals including SIGKDD, WWW, ICML, CIDR, ICDE, JMLR, and TKDE. His recent academic activities include PC co-chair of IIWeb 2014, senior PC of IJCAI 2013, SDM 2013, and KDD 2012, and PC member of WWW 2014, KDD 2014, WSDM 2015. Some entity mining and search technologies he developed have been transferred to Microsoft Bing.

Takeshi Oishi is an associate professor at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Keio University in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Interdisciplinary Information Studies from the University of Tokyo in 2005. His research interests are in 3D modeling from reality, digital archiving of cultural heritage assets, and mixed/augmented reality. He has served as program committee member for several computer vision conferences, including ICCV, CVPR, ACCV, and 3DIM/3DPVT (merged into 3DV). He also organized the first three ACCV Workshops on e-Heritage and ICPR Workshop on Depth Image Analysis (WDIA).

Dr. Tim Pan is university relations director of Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the lab’s academic collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region.

Tim Pan leads a regional team with members based in China, Japan, and Korea engaging universities, research institutes, and certain relevant government agencies. He establishes strategies and directions, identifies business opportunities, and designs various programs and projects that strengthen partnership between Microsoft Research and academia.

Tim Pan earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He has 20 years of experience in the computer industry and has co-founded two technology companies. Tim has a great passion for talent fostering. He served as a board member of St. John’s University (Taiwan) for 10 years, offered college-level courses, and wrote a textbook about information security. Between 2005 and 2007, Tim worked for Microsoft Research Asia as a university relations manager for Taiwan and Hong Kong. He rejoined Microsoft Research Asia in 2012.

Christos H. Papadimitriou is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and the Senior Scientist of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Before joining Berkeley in 1996, he taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and University of California, San Diego. He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, the Internet, economics, and evolution. He has also published three novels. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (United States), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and seven honorary doctorates.

Tai-Quan (Winson) Peng (PhD, City University of Hong Kong, 2008) is currently an assistant professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication of Nanyang Technological University at Singapore. His recent research interest lies in political communication on social media, public sentiment on social media, and the diffusion of viral messages on social media. His work has been supported by Microsoft, Singapore Academic Research Fund, and Nanyang Technological University.

David S. Rosenblum is professor of Computer Science and Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore, where he also directs the Felicitous Computing Institute. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1988, and he was previously a research scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill); associate professor at the University of California, Irvine; principal architect and chief technology officer of PreCache (a technology startup funded by Sony Music); and professor of Software Systems at University College London. His research interests are centered on problems in the design, analysis, and testing of large-scale distributed software systems and ubiquitous computing systems. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM). In 2002 he received the ICSE Most Influential Paper Award for his ICSE 1992 paper on assertion checking, and in 2008 he received the first ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award with Alexander L. Wolf for their ESEC/FSE 1997 paper on Internet-scale event notification. He has been the recipient of an NSF CAREER grant in the United States and a Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society in the United Kingdom. He is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE and a senior member of the Singapore Computer Society, and he is the past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT).

Jeha Ryu received his B.S. degree at Seoul National University, Korea, in 1982, M.S. degree at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea, in 1984, and Ph.D. degree at the University of Iowa, United States, in 1991—all in mechanical engineering. He has been a professor in the Department of Mechatronics at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) since 1994. He was a visiting researcher at the Virtual Reality Lab at Rutger University’s CAIP Center during 2001–2002. He has been the director of the Korean National Haptics Technology Research Center since 2008. His main research area is the haptic technology that includes haptic interaction control in virtual environments, haptic tele-operation over any networks, tele-rehabilitation robotics, design and control of haptic devices, haptic rendering, modeling, authoring, and haptic broadcasting systems. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics during 2008–2011 and as the president of the Korean Haptic society during 2013–2014.

Arjmand Samuel works with the academic community to foster research and collaborations in the devices and services research areas. He leads the mobile and cloud computing research and outreach for Microsoft Research (Project Hawaii and TouchDevelop). His recent research interests are in software architectures and programming paradigms for devices of all shapes and forms (TouchDevelop and HomeOS). He has published in a variety of publications on topics of security, privacy, location aware access control, and innovative use of mobile technology. Samuel has a Ph.D. in Information Security from Purdue University.

Bin Shao is a researcher at Microsoft Research (Beijing, China). He joined Microsoft after receiving his Ph.D. degree from Fudan University in July 2010. He received his B.S. degree from Shandong University in July 2005. Bin Shao is the architect, and the main developer of the Microsoft Research Trinity project, which builds a graph processing engine on a distributed in-memory storage infrastructure called memory cloud. His research interests include in-memory databases, distributed systems, graph query processing, and optimistic consistency maintenance.

Dr. Guangzhong Sun is an associate professor in School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He is a member of National High Performance Computing Center (Hefei). He got his Ph.D. in computer science at USTC in 2005. He worked as a visiting researcher in Microsoft Research Asia from October 2007 to August 2008 and from September 2010 to February 2011. He has published more than 40 papers, including papers in reputed journals and major international conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE and CCF and a member of ACM and SIAM. His research interests include pervasive computing, data processing, parallel computing, and combinatorial algorithms.

Jian was born in Xian (home of Terracotta Army), China. He received a BS degree, a MS degree, and a PhD degree from Xian Jiaotong University in 1997, 2000, and 2003. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2003. His research is in the fields of computer vision and computer graphics, with particular interests in interactive compute vision (user interface + vision), and internet compute vision (large image collection + vision). He is also interested in stereo matching, computational photography, face recognition, and deep learning. He received Best Paper Award for the paper “Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior” at CVPR 2009. In 2010, he was named one of the world’s top 35 young innovators by MIT Technology Review. He served as an area chair for ICCV 2011, CVPR 2013, and as a committee member for Siggraph 2011. Now, he is leading a compute vision team at Microsoft Research Asia.

Born in Shanghai, China, Hong studied Biomedical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and later earned her master’s and doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She became fascinated with haptics research after meeting a deaf and blind person who “read” speech by placing his hand on the speaker’s talking face. During her doctoral research, Hong built a device called the Tactuator and demonstrated its ability to transmit 12 bits per second through touch, the same rate at which the deaf and blind person can read speech with hand. Afterwards, Hong worked at the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist and developed the Sensing Chair, a sitting posture classifier using real-time pressure distribution data from an office chair. Since 1998, Hong has been on the faculty at Purdue University, taking a perception-based approach to developing haptic interfaces that match human sensory and motor capabilities. In 2011, Hong took a sabbatical leave from Purdue University to explore the commercialization of haptics technologies at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China. She is currently a senior researcher and manager of the Human Computer Interaction group at Microsoft Research Asia. Her current research interests include haptic interactions on touchscreens and in wearables.

Xin Tong is a principal researcher in Internet Graphics Group of Microsoft Research Asia. He obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Graphics from Tsinghua University in 1999. Before that, Xin got my B.S. Degree and Master Degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in 1993 and 1996 respectively. His research interests include appearance modeling and rendering, texture synthesis, image based modeling and rendering, and performance capturing. Xin Tong is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics now. He also serves as Co-Chair of Pacific Graphics 2013 and paper committee member of SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH ASIA.

Hao-Chuan Wang has been an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Information Systems and Applications of National Tsing Hua University since February 2012. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science from Cornell University in 2011. He also studied and worked at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2006–2008) and the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica (2004–2006). Prof. Wang’s main research interest lies in the collaborative and social aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI). His work aims to integrate computing research and behavioral and social sciences for problem solving and value creation. His recent projects include designing and evaluating machine translation tools for supporting cross-lingual communication and collaboration, using motion sensors to study human communication, and supporting education and learning with visualization and mobile devices. He is an active participant of international and regional HCI communities, such as ACM SIGCHI. He serves as one of the Program Committee associate chairs for CHI 2015, CSCW 2015, CHI 2014, CSCW 2013, and the Demonstrations co-chair for CSCW 2014. He is also the Program co-chair for Chinese CHI 2014. Professor Wang has received funding support for his research from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, Microsoft Research Asia, Google, Industrial Technology Research Institute, and Delta Electronics.

Jeannette M. Wing is corporate vice president, Microsoft Research. She is in charge of the seven Microsoft Research labs worldwide. She joined Microsoft last year from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was President’s Professor of Computer Science and twice served as the head of the Computer Science Department. From 2007 to 2010, she was the assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Wing has published extensively in the areas of trustworthy computing (including security and privacy), specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering.

She has been on many government, academic, and industrial advisory boards, and is incoming chair of DARPA ISAT. She is on the editorial boards of seven journals, including Communications of the ACM and Journal of the ACM. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011.

She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

Dr. Huayi Wu is a Distinguished Professor of the Chang Jiang Scholars Program in Cartography and Geographic Information Engineering. He is an associate director of the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS). He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in 1988 and 1991 on Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, and his Ph.D. on Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. His Ph.D. thesis was among the top 100 best thesis research in China in the year 2002. He was awarded the New Century Talent in University by the Ministry of Education, China. His research interest is geospatial information sharing and interoperability. He has served as PI for a series of projects supported by the Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Education. He has successfully organized several international academic meetings or sessions. He is a reviewer of several journals in this field, including International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS), and Computers & Graphics (C&G). He owns two patents and five software registrations in China. He has supervised more than 23 master students and 8 Ph.D. students. He published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. He is a member of ISPRS, AGU, and AAG and chairs the ISPRS VI/1 working group.

Ming Wu is a lead researcher in Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include large-scale distributed storage and computation, transaction processing, parallel and distributed graph computation, distributed system diagnostics, and scheduling and resource management in large-scale data center clusters. Since joining Microsoft Research Asia in 2007, he has published many research papers in several top conferences in system research area, including OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, Eurosys, Usenix, FSE, and PPoPP. He received his BS in computer science from University of Science and Technology of China in 2002 and received Ph.D. in computer science from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science in 2007.

Dr. Zhpeing Xu is a technique director and developer in the Center for Documentation and Information Management in the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Currently, Xu focuses on the biodiversity informatics, database, web GIS, and digital library. Xu has published more than 20 articles in biodiversity informatics, geology, computer sciences, digital library, and heritage tourism.

Dr. Xu is an assistant director of the NSII (National Specimen Information Infrastructure, 2014-), a member of PASTD (Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in/for/with Developing Countries), a Task Group member of CODATA (2013–2014), the node manager of GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), a member of CAS (2013-), and a member of Young Workgroup of National Science & Technology Infrastructure (2013-).

Andrew Yao is currently the dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He received his BS in Physics from National Taiwan University, PhD in Physics from Harvard University, and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois. From 1975 onward, Yao served on the faculty at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and, during 1986 to 2004, as William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. In 2004, he left Princeton to join Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is also a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Yao’s research interests are in the theory of computation and its applications to cryptography and quantum computing. In 2000, he was honored with the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for his contributions to the theory of computation, including pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity. He has received numerous other honors and awards, including the George Polya Prize, the Donald E. Knuth Prize, and several honorary degrees. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Hwasoo Yeo was born in Seoul, Korea in 1972. He received his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1996 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, United States, in 2008. Since 2009, he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KAIST. His current research interests include theoretical and simulation studies on traffic flow and traffic operations, traffic safety, and intelligent transportation systems.

Wenjun Zeng is a principal researcher and research manager of the Internet Media Group at Microsoft Research Asia. Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Wenjun was with the Computer Science Dept. of Univ. of Missouri (MU), most recently as a full professor. He worked for PacketVideo Corp., Sharp Labs of America, Bell Labs, and Panasonic Technology prior to joining MU in 2003. Wenjun has contributed significantly to the development of international standards (ISO MPEG, JPEG2000, and OMA), and has developed wireless video streaming products that have been widely used. He holds fifteen US patents. Wenjun received his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua Univ., the Univ. of Notre Dame, and Princeton Univ., respectively. His current research interest includes mobile-cloud media computing, social network/media analysis, multimedia communications/networking, and content/network security.

He is/was an AE of IEEE Trans. on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), IEEE Multimedia (currently an Associate EiC), IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics & Security, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (TMM), and is/was on the Steering Committee of IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing (current) and IEEE TMM (2009–2012). He served as the Steering Committee Chair of IEEE Inter. Conf. Multimedia and Expo (ICME) in 2010 and 2011, and has served as the TPC Chair/co-Chair of several IEEE conferences (e.g., ChinaSIP’15, WIFS’13, ICME’09, CCNC’07). He will be a general co-Chair of ICME2018. He is currently guest editing a TCSVT Special Issue on Visual Computing in the Cloud – Mobile Computing, and was a guest editor (GE) of ACM TOMCCAP Special Issue on ACM MM 2012 Best Papers, a GE of the Proceedings of the IEEE’s Special Issue on Recent Advances in Distributed Multimedia Communications (January 2008) and the lead GE of IEEE TMM’s Special Issue on Streaming Media (April 2004). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Jianwen joined the Machine Learning Group of Microsoft Research Asia in July 2011 after receiving his PhD degree from Tsinghua University. Jianwen is interested in theories and algorithms of machine learning and their applications in text understanding and information retrieval.

Dr. Zhao is an assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the hardware, mobile and sensing, software analytics, systems, and networking research areas. His own research has focused on wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient computing, and mobile systems. Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia in 2009, he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond (2004–2009), and founded the Networked Embedded Computing Group that has designed and deployed sensor networks at several Microsoft datacenters for environmental monitoring and energy optimization. He was a principal scientist at Xerox PARC 1997–2004, and founded PARC’s sensor network effort.

Dr. Zhao has championed the wireless sensor network and energy-efficient computing research in the past two decades. He was among the first to develop a suite of collaborative sensing and processing protocols for tracking problems by using networked sensors, including the IDSQ algorithm. He authored or co-authored more than 100 technical papers and books, including Wireless Sensor Networks: An Information Processing Approach, co-authored with Leonidas Guibas. He was the founding editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (2003–2010), and founded the ACM/IEEE IPSN conference. In 2008, he helped start a new workshop, HotPower, focusing on the emerging topic of sustainable computing.

Dr. Zhao received a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and a BS from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He taught at Ohio State University and Stanford University. An IEEE Fellow, Dr. Zhao received a Sloan Research Fellowship (1994) and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards (1994, 1997). His work has been featured in news media such as BBC World News, Businessweek, and Technology Review.

Dr. Yu Zheng is a lead researcher from Microsoft Research, passionate about using big data to tackle urban challenges. His research into urban computing has attracted a broad range of attention from the community, receiving four best paper awards at prestigious conferences (such as ICDE’13 and ACM SIGSPATIAL’11). He has been featured multiple times by influential journals, such as MIT Technology Review and New Scientist.

Zheng is a member of Editorial Advisory Board of IEEE Spectrum and a visiting chair professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has served as chair on 10 prestigious international conferences—most recently, as the program co-chair of ICDE 2014 (Industrial Track). He has been invited to give over 10 keynote speeches at international conferences and forums (for example, IE’14 and APEC 2014 Smart City Forum) and guest lectures in universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Cornell. In 2013, he was named one of the Top Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review (TR35) for his research on using data science to solve urban challenges. He was featured by Time Magazine due to his research on urban computing in November 2013.

Dr. Ming Zhou is a principal researcher and manager of the Natural Language Computing Group (NLC) at Microsoft Research. He graduated from Chongqing University in 1985. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1991. He was a post-doctorate researcher at Tsinghua University during 1991–1993, he then joined the faculty of Tsinghua University as an associate professor in 1993. He visited Kodensha Ltd., a famous machine-translation software maker in Japan during 1996–1999 to lead the R&D on Chinese-Japanese machine translation. Dr. Zhou joined Microsoft Research in 1999 as researcher and became the manager of the NLC Group in 2001. He concurrently was the manager of Speech Group in 2004. His primary research interests lie in the development of advanced and practical technologies of natural language processing (NLP) such as syntactic and semantic parser, text mining, machine translation, question-answering, chatbot, summarization, knowledge base, and computer poetry. He has also focused on applying developed NLP technologies to solve difficult problems in human-computer interaction, spoken translator, search engine, mobile assistant, online advertisement, and online education.

Dr. Zhou has published over 100 papers at top conferences (ACL, COLING, SIGIR, KDD, EMNLP, IJCAI, AAAI, WWW) and in journals, and served as an area chair and PC chair for many NLP conferences and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Linguistics, Journal of Machine Translation, and ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing. As his PhD research topic at Harbin Institute of Technology, he invented the first Chinese-English machine translation system (CEMT) in China in 1989. During his visit at Kodensha Ltd., he designed the famous Chinese-Japanese machine translation software product, J-Beijing, which was shipped in Japan in 1999. It was also deployed in J-Server, a well-received popular machine translation service which later won the Makoto Nagao Award in 2008. He is the principal inventor and research leader of many products and technologies including the famous computer Chinese Couplets system, Chinese-English machine translation system, IME for Chinese and Japanese, Bing Dictionary (also known as Engkoo Dictionary), Engkoo Question-Answering System, and QuickView tweet text mining and search system. Under his leadership, the NLC group made outstanding contributions to Microsoft products including Windows, Bing, and Office with NLP technologies. Bing Dictionary received the Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Award: Reader’s Choice in 2010. Dr. Zhou has profound collaboration with partners in many universities. He is a PhD supervisor at Harbin Institute of Technology, Tianjin University, Nankai University, and Shandong University. He was the co-director of the Microsoft-HIT Joint Lab on NLP and Speech from 2000 to 2008 and has been the co-director of the Microsoft-Tsinghua Joint Lab on Media and Network since 2008. He received the Ability Award from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2014 to recognize his outstanding contribution to the Kinect-based sign language translator, an influential collaboration with the China Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Conghui Zhu, supervisor of master students, was awarded his doctoral degree in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2009. The same year, he joined the computer science and technology school as an assistant professor. His research focuses on natural language processing and machine translation. He has published several papers in ACL, COLING, and EMNLP. His research about pivot translation received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2012 and he visited the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology as a visiting scholar in 2013. In IWSLT2012 translation track Olympic task, his team got the first rank. In 2005, while still a PhD student, he visited Microsoft Research Asia for an internship and publish his first paper in ACL. As the main participant of the Chinese minority ethnic language translation projecthe releases some basic NLP toolkits to build high quality parallel sentence pairs and helps train Uygur students to grasp the machine translation method.

Dr. Jun Zhu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. His principal research interests lie in the development of statistical machine learning methods for solving scientific and engineering problems arising from artificial and biological learning, reasoning, and decision-making in the high-dimensional and dynamic worlds. Prof. Zhu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 2009. Before joining Tsinghua in 2011, he did post-doctoral research in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His current work involves both the foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for probabilistic latent variable models, sparse learning in high dimensions, Bayesian nonparametrics, and large-margin learning; and the application of statistical learning in social network analysis, data mining, and multi-media data analysis.

Prof. Zhu has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in the prestigious conferences and journals, including ICML, NIPS, KDD, JMLR, PAMI, etc. He is an associate editor for IEEE Trans. on PAMI. He served as Area Chair for approximately 10 top-tier conferences, including ICML (2014, 2015), IJCAI (2013, 2015), UAI 2014, and NIPS 2013. He was a local co-chair of ICML 2014. He is a recipient of the CCF Distinguished PhD Thesis Award (2009), Microsoft Fellowship (2007), IEEE Intelligent Systems “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award (2013), NSFC Excellent Young Scholar Award (2013), and CCF Young Scientist Award (2013). His work is supported by the “221 Basic Research Plan for Young Talents” at Tsinghua University.

Yanmin Zhu is an associate professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Prior to joining Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he was a research associate with the Department of Computing at the Imperial College London. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2007, and earned his bachelor degree in Computer Science from Xi’an Jiao Tong University in 2002.

His research interests include wireless sensor networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, mobile computing, and participatory sensing. He has published over 100 papers in international conference and peer-reviewed journals, including prestigious conferences such as IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), and top journals such as IEEE Journal on Selected Topics on Communications (JSAC), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). He is a recipient of two Best Paper Awards. He has served on program committees of many computer networking and communications conferences, such as INFOCOM, ICDCS, GlobeCom, and ICC. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.