Asia Faculty Summit 2016

Dr. Yong-Hak Kim is a leading expert in social network theories, he places emphasis on the importance of facilitating “extelligence,” the improvement of intelligence through the coupling of otherwise estranged bright ideas. After becoming the 18th President of Yonsei University in February 2016, one of his first initiatives was to establish the “Creative Playground” in the University Library, a habitat where students can share opinions for interdisciplinary research and cultivate experimental ideas to develop innovative startups. As we enter a generation with a 100-year life expectancy, the world must explore uncharted territory due to the revolutionary developments in science and technology and information communication. This demands a new university paradigm. Accordingly, Dr. Kim has commenced forward-thinking innovation of the university’s research, administration, and education system to become a pioneering leader of our rapidly changing society.

Dr. Kim has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Society, Rationality and Society, and Korean Journal of Sociology. He also has held positions in various government committees as a policy advisor, including the Consulting Committee of the president of Korea and the Neural Science Review Committee of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Yonsei University, Professor Kim received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. Since beginning his professorship at Yonsei University in 1987, Dr. Kim previously served in various senior administrative positions such as Vice President of the Admissions Office, Dean of the University College, Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and Dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration.

Dr. Peter Lee is a computer scientist, technology innovator, and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab). He leads Microsoft’s New Experiences and Technologies organization (NExT), with the mission to create research-powered technologies and products, and to advance human knowledge through fundamental scientific research. While NExT openly publishes its research work, its technology projects are often conducted more secretly. Still, recently publicized projects are illustrative of Dr. Lee’s approach to bringing advanced research ideas into the real world, for example: advances in artificial intelligence, such as deep neural networks (opens in new tab) for computer vision and the simultaneous language translation feature in Skype (opens in new tab); new silicon (opens in new tab) and post-silicon (opens in new tab) computer architectures for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and experimental under-sea datacenters (opens in new tab); next-generationaugmented-reality experiences (opens in new tab) for HoloLens and virtual reality devices; large-scale digital storage in DNA (opens in new tab); and AI-powered socio-technological experiments such as XiaoIce (opens in new tab) and Tay (opens in new tab).

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Lee held executive positions in both government and academia. At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he founded a new division focused on research and development programs in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. One example of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge (opens in new tab), an open competition that mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that altered the thinking throughout the Department of Defense on the power of social networks.

Before DARPA, Lee served as Head of Carnegie Mellon University’s top-ranked computer science department (opens in new tab) and also briefly as the university’s Vice Provost for Research. As a Professor of Computer Science, he carried out research in computer security, software reliability, program analysis, and language design. He published over 90 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, several of which have been recognized with “test of time” awards, including the ACM SIGOPS 2006 Hall of Fame Award (opens in new tab), for their seminal contributions to the field. At CMU, he was a devoted, award-winning teacher, and advised doctoral students to 15 completed Ph.D.’s who today are working across academia and industry.

Peter Lee is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a dedicated advocate for the academic research community, serving in a variety of national and international venues. In 2016, he was appointed by President Obama to the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity (opens in new tab). He is a member of the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (opens in new tab), where he recently chaired key studies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth (opens in new tab). Dr. Lee is a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (opens in new tab), and the former Chair of Board of the Computing Research Association (opens in new tab). In 2010, Dr. Lee co-chaired a review of federal investments in networking and information technology for the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (opens in new tab). Dr. Lee has also appeared before both the US House Science and Technology Committee (opens in new tab) and the US Senate Commerce Committee (opens in new tab), testifying on the importance of federal investments in basic research – the Federal NITRD program and the America COMPETES Act – to the nation’s economy, global competitiveness, innovation, and national security. In the tech industry, Dr. Lee is a highly sought public speaker, widely quoted on industry trends and disruptive innovation organizations such as the New York Times (opens in new tab), MIT Technology Review (opens in new tab), Wired (opens in new tab), Fast Company (opens in new tab), The Economist (opens in new tab), ArsTechnica (opens in new tab), CNN (opens in new tab), Seattle Times (opens in new tab), and dozens of other universities and media outlets.

Tie-Yan Liu is a principal researcher of Microsoft Research Asia, leading the machine learning group. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, data mining, and computational economics. As a researcher in an industrial lab, Tie-Yan is making his unique contributions to the world. On one hand, many of his technologies have been transferred to Microsoft’s products and online services, such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, and Azure. He has received many recognitions and awards in Microsoft for his significant product impacts. On the other hand, he has been actively contributing to the academic community. He is an adjunct professor at CMU and several universities in China, and an honorary professor at Nottingham University. He is frequently invited to chair or give keynote speeches at major machine learning and information retrieval conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM, as well as a senior member, distinguished speaker, and academic committee member of the CCF.

Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information (opens in new tab) and the EECS Department (opens in new tab) at UC Berkeley (opens in new tab). Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and improving MOOCs. She wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces (opens in new tab). Prof. Hearst was named a Fellow of the ACM (opens in new tab) in 2013 and has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, two Google Research Awards, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, four Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principal investigator for more than $3.5M in research grants.

Prof. Hearst is currently Vice President-elect of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (opens in new tab). She has served on the Advisory Council of NSF’s CISE Directorate (opens in new tab) and is currently on the Web Board for CACM (opens in new tab), member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary (opens in new tab), and on the Edge.org (opens in new tab) panel of experts. She is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (opens in new tab) (TOCHI) and was formerly on the boards of ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), and IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and PhD (opens in new tab) degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is corporate vice president of Microsoft, chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D Group, and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia (opens in new tab). He drives Microsoft’s strategy for research and development activities in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as collaborations with academia.

Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as deputy managing director, stepping into the role of managing director in 2007. He founded and managed Microsoft Search Technology Center from 2005 to 2007 and led development of Microsoft’s search products (Bing) in Asia-Pacific. In 2014, Dr. Hon was appointed as chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

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 architectural and technical aspects of the award-winning Microsoft Speech Server product, Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he was 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, where he led research and development for Apple’s Chinese Dictation Kit.

An IEEE Fellow and a distinguished scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. 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 universities around the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozen patents in several technical areas.

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

Seong-Whan Lee obtained his B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics from Seoul National University in 1984, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Dr. Lee is the Hyundai Motor chair professor and the head of Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering of Korea University since 2009.

Dr. Lee is a fellow of IEEE, IAPR and Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and has served several professional societies and governmental committees as a chairman or governing board member. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition and has been an Associate Editor of several international journals: ACM Trans. on Applied Perception, IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing, Pattern Recognition, Image and Vision Computing, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and International Journal of Image and Graphics.

He served as the General Chair of the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Biologically Motivated Computer Vision(2000), the 6th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition(2004), the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Biometrics(2007), and the 11th IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics(2012). He also served as the Program Chair of the 8th IEEE International Conference Document Analysis and Recognition(2005) and the 18th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition(2006).

Currently, he is serving as the president of the Korea Artificial Intelligence Society. His research interests include artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and brain and cognitive engineering. He has authored more than 300 publications in international journals and conference proceedings with 8,921 Google Scholar citations and 10 books.

Katsushi Ikeuchi received the BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kyoto University in 1973 and the PhD degree in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978. After working at the MIT-AI Lab, CMU-Robotics Institute, U Tokyo-Institute of Industrial Science, he joined Microsoft Research Asia as a Principal Researcher in 2015. During this tenure, he supervised more than 50 PhD students. His research interest spans computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. In these research fields, he has received several best paper awards, including the David Marr award. His community service include a dozen general or program chairs of major international conferences, including CVPR’96, ICCV’15. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision. He received the Distinguished Researcher Award from IEEE-PAMI, Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (Shiju-ho-syo) from Japanese Emperor and the Okawa award from Okawa foundation.

Hiroshi Ishiguro (M’) received a D.Eng. in systems engineering from the Osaka University, Japan in 1991. He is currently Professor of Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (2009-), Distinguished Professor of Osaka University (2013-) and visiting Director (2014-) (group leader: 2002-2013) of Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute and an ATR fellow. His research interests include distributed sensor systems, interactive robotics, and android science. He has published more than 300 papers in major journals and conferences, such as Robotics Research and IEEE PAMI. On the other hand, he has developed many humanoids and androids, called Robovie, Repliee, Geminoid, Telenoid, and Elfoid. These robots have been reported many times by major media, such as Discovery channel, NHK, and BBC. He has also received the best humanoid award four times in RoboCup. In 2011, he won the Osaka Cultural Award presented by the Osaka Prefectural Government and the Osaka City Government for his great contribution to the advancement of culture in Osaka. In 2015, he received the Prize for Science and Technology (Research Category) by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

Masayuki Inaba is a professor of Department of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. He received Dr. of Engineering of Information Engineering from The University of Tokyo in 1986. He was appointed as a lecturer in 1986, an associate professor in 1989, and a professor in 2000 at The University of Tokyo. His research interests include key technologies of robotic system, humanoid and software architecture for advanced robots. His research projects have included hand-eye coordination in rope handling, vision-based robotic server system, remote-brained robot approach, whole-body behaviors in humanoids, robot sensor suit with electrically conductive fabric, musculoskeltal humanoid development, humanoid specialization for home assistance, and developmental integration systems with open source robot platforms. He received several awards including outstanding Paper Awards in 1987, 1998, 1999 and 2015 from the Robotics Society of Japan, JIRA Awards in 1994, ROBOMECH Awards in 1994 and 1996 from the division of Robotics and Mechatronics of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Best Paper Awards of International Conference on Humanoids in 2000 and 2006, ICRA Conference Best Paper Award in 2014 with JSK Robotics Lab members.

Prof. Jin Bae Park is a professor of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. His major research interests include intelligent mobile robot, drone control, adaptive dynamic programming, fuzzy logic control, neural networks, artificial intelligence, and genetic algorithms. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yonsei University in 1977 and received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Kansas State University in 1985 and 1990, respectively.

After joining Yonsei University in 1992, Professor Park has been appointed for major leadership positions in the University, including Dean of Information and Communication Services (2004-2005), Dean of Admissions (2005-2006), Dean of Research Affairs/President of University-Industry Foundation (2006-2008). Senior Vice President for Administration and Development (2014-2016) and Senior Vice President of International Campus (2015-2016).

He was the editor-in-chief for International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems from January 2006 to December 2010, and the President for the institution of Control, Robotics and Systems (ICROS) in 2013. He has published more than 1,200 papers and has been received more than 30 awards because of his academic excellence including research, teaching, and services.

Dr. Qiang HUO is a Principal Research Manager of Speech Group of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Prior to joining MSRA 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 Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) in Kyoto, Japan. In the past 30 years, he has been doing research and making contributions in the areas of speech recognition, ink recognition, OCR, gesture recognition, biometric-based user authentication, hardware design for speech and image processing. Many multimodal interaction technologies Qiang and his team invented and developed have been deployed in Microsoft’s products and services such as Windows, Windows Phone, Office, OneNote, OneDrive, Bing Translator, Bing Dictionary, Microsoft Speech Platform, Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Professor Jingdong Chen received the Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and intelligence control from the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998. He is currently a professor at the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an, China. Before joining NPU in Jan. 2011, he served as the Chief Scientist of WeVoice Inc. in New Jersey for one year. Prior to this position, he was with Bell Labs in New Jersey for nine years. Before joining Bell Labs, he held positions at the Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Kyoto, Japan. His research interests include acoustic signal processing, microphone array processing, speech enhancement, and adaptive noise/echo control. He co-authored 11 monograph books, published nearly 200 papers in academic journals and conferences.

Dr. Chen served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing from 2008 to 2014 and as a technical committee (TC) member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) TC on Audio and Electroacoustics from 2007 to 2009. He is currently a member of the IEEE SPS TC on Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. He was the General Chair of IWANC 2016, the Technical Program Chair of IEEE TENCON 2013, a Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE WASPAA 2009, IEEE ChinaSIP 2014, IEEE ICSPCC 2014, and IEEE ICSPCC 2015, and helped organize many other conferences.

Dr. Chen received the 2008 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the best paper award from the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) in 2011, the Bell Labs Role Model Teamwork Award twice, respectively, in 2009 and 2007, the NASA Tech Brief Award twice, respectively, in 2010 and 2009, the Young Author Best Paper Award from the National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communications in 1998. He is also the Co-author of a paper for which Chao Pan received the IEEE Region 10 Distinguished Student Paper Award (First Prize) in 2016. Dr. Chen was a recipient of the Japan Trust International Research Grant from the Japan Key Technology Center in 1998 and the “Distinguished Young Scientists Fund” from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2014.

Professor Tatsuya Kawahara received B.E. in 1987, M.E. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1995, all in information science, from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently, he is a Professor in the School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He has also been an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT.

He has published more than 300 technical papers on speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several speech-related projects in Japan including speech recognition software Julius and the automatic transcription system for the Japanese Parliament (Diet).

From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee. He was a general chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding workshop (ASRU 2007). He also served as a Tutorial Chair of INTERSPEECH 2010 and a Local Arrangement Chair of ICASSP 2012. He is an editorial board member of Elsevier Journal of Computer Speech and Language, APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. He is VP-Publications (BoG member) of APSIPA and a senior member of IEEE.

Professor Kai Yu is the director of the SpeechLab at Computer Science and Engineering Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the co-founder and Chief Scientist of AISpeech Ltd. Prior to joining SJTU as a research professor, he was a senior research associate at Cambridge University and a co-founder of VocalIQ which was later acquired by Apple. He got his Bachelor and Master from Tsinghua University in 1999, 2002 and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2006. He is a senior member of IEEE and the associate director of the technical committee of the Alliance of Intelligent Speech Technology Industry of China. His research interests include dialogue systems, speech recognition, synthesis, speaker verification, natural language processing and machine learning. He has published over 80 peer reviewed papers and is one of the recipients of the ISCA Computer Speech and Language Best Paper Award (2008-2012). He was selected into the “1000 Overseas Talent Plan (Young Talent)” by Chinese central government, the “Excellent Young Scientists Project” by NSFC China and the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning. He was awarded WuWenJun Science and Technology Progress Award by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence for his contribution in commercializing speech technology for language learning.

Dr. Ming Zhou is a principal researcher and manager of Natural Language Computing Group in Microsoft Research Asia. He is the chair of Chinese Information Technology Committee of Chinese Computer Federation and executive member of Chinese Information Processing Society.

He designed the CEMT-I machine translation system in 1989, the first experiment of Chinese-English machine translation in Mainland China. He designed the famous Chinese-Japanese machine translation software product J-Beijing in Japan which was deployed in J-Server, the popular translation service in Japan that was granted Makoto Nagao Award by Japan Machine Translation Association in 2008. He is the leader of the famous AI gaming of Chinese Couplets/Poetry Generation and Riddles(http://duilian.msra.cn), and the English Assistance Search Engine, Engkoo, which won the Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Asian Innovation Readers’ Choice Award and was shipped in Bing in 2011 as Bing Dictionary(http://cn.bing.com/dict/), and Engkoo cloud IME which was shipped as Bing IME in 2012. Recently, his group has closely worked with MS product teams and shipped famous chat-bot products in China(Xiaoice), Japan(Rinna) and US(Tay).

Dr. Zhou received his B.S. degree in computer engineering from Chongqing University in 1985, and his M.S. degree and Ph.D. in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1988 and 1991. He did post-doctoral work at Tsinghua University from 1991 to 1993, then he became an associate professor. During 1996-1999, during his sabbatical leave, he worked for Kodensha Ltd. Co. in Japan as the leader of the Chinese-Japanese machine translation project. He joined the natural language group at Microsoft Research China (now Microsoft Research Asia) in Sept. 1999.

Tim Baldwin is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He has previously held visiting positions at Cambridge University, University of Washington, University of Tokyo, Saarland University, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, and National Institute of Informatics. His research interests include text mining of social media, computational lexical semantics, information extraction and web mining, with a particular interest in the interface between computational and theoretical linguistics. Current projects include web user forum mining, monitoring and text mining of Twitter, and text analytics for the creative industries.

Tim completed a BSc(CS/Maths) and BA(Linguistics/Japanese) at The University of Melbourne in 1995, and an MEng(CS) and PhD(CS) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Prior to joining The University of Melbourne in 2004, he was a Senior Research Engineer at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University (2001-2004).

Dr Zhao Jun is a professor at the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD degree from Tsinghua University in 1998. Before joining NLPR in 2002, he worked in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a postdoctoral research fellow. His current research focuses on natural language processing, information extraction and question answering. Prof Zhao has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in the prestigious conferences and journals, including ACL, SIGIR, TKDE, JLMR, IJCAI, EMNLP, etc. His paper “Relation Classification via Convolutional Deep Neural Network” obtained best paper award of COLING-2014. His paper “Collective entity linking in web text: a graph-based method” ranks 2 in the highest referenced papers of SIGIR in recent five years with the Google academic search. He also served as workshop cochair for ACL-2016.

Evelyne Viegas is the Director of Artificial Intelligence Outreach at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, U.S.A. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives which focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular she is creating programs around computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services; and projects to advance the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence and data-driven research including knowledge representation, machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty at scale.

Nicole M Beckage is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her work centers on the use of machine learning and complex systems approaches to understand learning and cognition. Applications of her work include predictive models of language acquisition, models of decision making, and assessment of information in qualitative research interviews. She received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2010 and has interned with Microsoft Research and Pearson Education.

Chang D. Yoo is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech. His research interest are in machine learning for signal processing and speech and image processing. His current interests are in developing deep architectures for speech, face and cell classification, blind source separation, source localization and computer vision.

He was a visiting scientist at RLE, MIT in 2005 and 2015. He was on the IEEE Technical Committee on Machine Learning for Signal Processing from 2009 to 2011. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY. He was the Dean of Special Projects and Institutional Relations at KAIST and Associate Vice President, of Special Projects and Institutional Relations at KAIST.

Dr. Rui Cai is a lead researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2001 and 2006, respectively. His research interests include computer vision, multimedia content analysis, web search and data mining. He has published more than 40 quality papers in referred international conferences and journals, including ICCV, CVPR, KDD, WWW, SIGIR, KDD, ACM Multimedia, etc. He also has more than 20 granted US / international patents.”

Min H. Kim is an associate professor of computer science at KAIST, Korea, leading the Visual Computing Laboratory (VCLAB). Prior to KAIST, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. He received his PhD in computer science from University College London (UCL) in 2010, with a focus on color reproduction in computer graphics. In addition to serving on many conference program committees, he has been an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), and Elsevier Computers and Graphics (CAG). His research interests include computational imaging, such as computational photography, 3D imaging, and hyperspectral imaging, in addition to color and visual perception.

Yebin Liu is an associate professor in Automation Department, Tsinghua University. He received the B.E. degree from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, in 2002, and the PhD degree from the Automation Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2009. His research areas include computer vision, computer graphics and computational photography and mainly focus in capture and reconstruction of real world visual information. He has been awarded the NSFC Excellent Young Scientist Grant in 2015 and the First Prize of National Science and Technology Invention Award in 2012.

Prof. Yasuyuki Matsushita received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EECS from the University of Tokyo in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. From April 2003 to March 2015, he was with Visual Computing group at Microsoft Research Asia. In April 2015, he joined Osaka University as a professor. His research area includes computer vision, machine learning and optimization. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) and has served/is serving as a Program co-chair of PSIVT 2010, 3DIMPVT 2011, ACCV 2012, ICCV 2017, and a General co-chair for ACCV 2014. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Mu Li is a senior researcher in Natural Language Computing Group of Microsoft Research Asia. He received Ph.D. degree from Northeastern University, China in March 2001, and then joint Microsoft Research. His interests ranges from machine translation, language modeling, syntactic parsing, Asian language processing, deep learning and other NLP and machine learning tasks. He had published over 50 papers in top AI and NLP conferences and journals including ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, CL etc., and his current focus is to build large-scale practical neural machine translation system.

Boxing Chen is a Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada (NRC). He works on natural language processing, mainly focus on machine translation. Prior to NRC, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore, a Postdoc at FBK-IRST in Italy and a Postdoc at the University of Grenoble in France. He received his PhD degree from Chinese Academy of Science in 2003. He has co-authered more than 40 papers in NLP conferences and journals. His teams ranked the first place in the NIST 2012 OpenMT Chinese-to-English translation, the first place in the IWSLT 2007 and 2005 Chinese-to-English spoken language translation evaluation.

Jiajun Zhang is an associate professor at National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he received the Ph.D degree in June 2011. His research interests include machine translation, deep learning, multi-lingual natural language processing. He has published more than 20 papers in top conference including AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP, COLING and in international journals including IEEE/ACM TASLP, IEEE Intelligent Systems, ACM TALLIP and TACL. He also received several best papers from PACLIC-2009, NLPCC-2012 and CWMT-2014.

Dr. Satoshi Nakamura is Professor of Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, Honorarprofessor of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He received his B.S. from Kyoto Institute of Technology in 1981 and Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1992. He was Associate Professor of Graduate School of Information Science at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1994-2000. He was Director of ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories in 2000-2008 and Vice president of ATR in 2007-2008. He was Director General of Keihanna Research Laboratories and the Executive Director of Knowledge Creating Communication Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan in 2009-2010. He is currently Director of Augmented Human Communication laboratory and a full professor of Graduate School of Information Science at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. He is interested in modeling and systems of speech-to-speech translation, spoken dialog systems and speech recognition. He is one of the leaders of speech-to-speech translation research and has been serving for various speech-to-speech translation research projects in the world including C-STAR, IWSLT and A-STAR. He served as a project leader of the network-based commercial speech-to-speech translation service for 3-G mobile phones in 2007 and VoiceTra project for iPhone in 2010. He received the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Science and Technology, and the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Internal Affair and Communications. He also received LREC Antonio Zampolli Award 2012. He has been an Elected Board Member of International Speech Communication Association, ISCA since June 2011, IEEE SPS Speech and Language Technical Committee Member since 2013, and IEEE Fellow since January 2016.

Jingdong Wang is a Lead Researcher at the Internet Media Group, Microsoft Research, Beijing, China. He received the B. Eng. and M. Eng. degrees in Automation from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, in 2007. His areas of interest include computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia. He is currently working on deep learning, human understanding, person re-identification, multimedia search, and large-scale indexing. He has served or will serve as an area chair in CVPR 2017, ECCV 2016, ACMMM 2015 and ICME 2015, a track chair in ICME 2012, a special session chair in ICMR 2014. He has also been invited to serve as an editorial board member for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, the international journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, an associate editor of the international journal of Neurocomputing. He has shipped 10+ technologies to Microsoft products, including XiaoIce, Microsoft cognitive service, and Bing search.

Dr. Peng Cui is an Assistant Professor in Tsinghua University. His research interests include network representation learning, social dynamics modeling and human behavioral modeling. He has published more than 60 papers in prestigious conferences and journals in data mining and multimedia. His recent research won the ICDM 2015 Best Student Paper Award, SIGKDD 2014 Best Paper Finalist, IEEE ICME 2014 Best Paper Award, ACM MM12 Grand Challenge Multimodal Award, and MMM13 Best Paper Award. He is the Area Chair of ICDM 2016, ACM MM 2014-2015, IEEE ICME 2014-2015, ICASSP 2013, Associate Editor of ACM TOMM, Elsevier Journal on Neurocomputing. He was the recipient of ACM China Rising Star Award in 2015.

Lexing Xie is Associate Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University, she leads the ANU Computational Media lab. Her research areas are in machine learning, multimedia, social media. Of particular recent interest are stochastic time series models, neural network for sequences, and active learning, applied to diverse problems such as multimedia knowledge graphs, modeling popularity in social media, joint optimization and structured prediction problems, and social recommendation. Lexing’s research has received six best student paper and best paper awards between 2002 and 2015. She is IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer 2016-2017. She currently serves an associate editor of ACM Trans. MM, ACM TiiS and PeerJ Computer Science. Her service roles include the program and organizing committees of major multimedia, machine learning, web and social media conferences. She was research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York from 2005 to 2010, and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University 2007-2009. She received B.S. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and Ph.D. from Columbia University, all in Electrical Engineering.

Toshihiko YAMASAKI is an Associate Professor, at the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. He received the B.S. degree, the M.S. degree, and the Ph.D. degree from The University of Tokyo in 1999, 2001, and 2004, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. He was a JSPS Fellow for Research Abroad and a visiting scientist at Cornell University from Feb. 2011 to Feb. 2013. His current research interests include multimedia big data analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, and so on. His publication includes three book chapters, more than 55 journal papers, more than 160 international conference papers, more than 470 domestic conference papers. He has received around 50 awards.

Dr. Kuansan Wang came to Microsoft Research in March 1998, first as a Researcher in the speech technology group working on the areas of spoken language understanding and dialog modeling. He contributed to the project MiPad and created the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) that is now part of the international standards ISO/IEC 18051/ECMA-269/ETSI TS 102 173, ISO/IEC 18056/ECMA-323/ETSI TS 101 990, and ECMA-348/ISO IEC 18450. An object model version, described in this TR he wrote, has entered its final phase of being standardized. He also contributed to the world wide web consortium (W3C) Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS), W3C Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), and various other publications from W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group. Many of his research papers can still be found at the speech group’s publication list and video demo area.

In January 2004, Dr. Kuansan Wang moved to the speech product group and became a software architect. There he helped create and ship the product Microsoft Speech Server, which is still powering the corporate call center for Microsoft. If you calling into Microsoft’s main number, you will be greeted by his automated operator, MS Connect. In this capacity, he also managed the revision of the speech system used in the Microsoft Voice Command, an add-on to Windows Mobile smart phone that allows users to operate their smart phones with voice in an eyes-busy, hands-busy environment. Many of the technologies are still in use in Cortana, a virtual personal assistant from Microsoft.

Dr. Kuansan Wang was a founding member of an incubation group inside Microsoft that shipped Microsoft Response Point, a speech-enabled small business phone system that uses voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies. Because the incubation group was structured to run like a start-up inside Microsoft, he had the opportunity to be the acting development manager and later the testing manager to build the engineering team from ground up. In addition to the speech capabilities, he was also responsible for ensuring the product is easy to setup and easy to use, including the invention of the magic “Response Point button” that earns Microsoft revenue on every phone sold without even having Microsoft software on it!

Since September 2007, Dr. Kuansan Wang has been back in Microsoft Research (MSR), joining the newly founded Internet Service Research Center with a mission to revolutionize online services and make Web more intelligent. He has been teaching the machine to read the massive web contents to extract the knowledge, to understand users’ interests and anticipate their needs, and to serve and alert the web knowledge to users in a helpful way, including engaging in a natural conversation or multimodal dialog. The first application, on changing the way web search works in Bing, was first announced at MSR Faculty Summit in July 2010. It is exhilarating to see that, since that public disclosure, major web search companies, such as Google (in 2012) and Baidu (in 2014), have also introduced similar services into their products. To ensure the research community can verify, replicate and advance our results, components and data sets underlying my research work have been made available through Microsoft Cognitive Services, ranging from the web scale Markov N-gram to Knowledge Exploration Service. In March 2016, he has taken on an additional role as a Managing Director of MSR Outreach, an organization with the mission to serve the research community. In addition to applying the intelligent technologies to make Bing and Cortana smarter in gathering and serving academic knowledge, we are also starting an experimental website, academic.microsoft.com (powered by Academic API), and mobile apps dedicated to exploring new service scenarios for active researchers.

Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Bell Labs from 1994 to 1996, and the NYNEX (now part of Verizon) Science and Technology Center. He received my M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1989 and 1994, and my B.S. from National Taiwan University in 1986, all in Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Xueqi Cheng is a professor in the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the director of the CAS Key Laboratory of Network Data Science and Technology. His main research areas include Web search and data mining, data science, and social media analytics et al. He is the general secretary of CCF Task Force on Big Data, the vice-chair of CIPS Task Force on Chinese Information Retrieval. He is the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Editorial Board Member of Journal of Computer Science and Technology and Chinese Journal of Computer. He was the general co-chair of ACM WSDM’15, Steering Committee co-chair of IEEE Conference on Big Data, PC chair of ChinaCom’12, and PC members of more than 20 conferences, including ACM SIGIR, WWW, ACM CIKM, ACL, IEEE ICDM, IJCAI, and ACM WSDM. He has more than 100 publications, and was awarded the Best Paper Award in ACM CIKM’11, and the Best Student Paper Award in ACM SIGIR’12. He is the founder of the open academic platform system (soscholar.com). He is also the principal investigator of more than 10 major research projects, funded by NSFC and MOST. He was awarded the NSFC Distinguished Youth Scientist (2014), the National Prize for Progress in Science and Technology (2012), the China Youth Science and Technology Award (2011).

Prof. Seung-won Hwang is a Professor of Computer Science at Yonsei University. Prior to joining Yonsei, she had been an Associate Professor at POSTECH for 10 years, after her PhD from UIUC. Her recent research interest has been data(-driven) intelligence, led to 100+ publication at top-tier database/mining, AI, and NLP venues, including ACL, AAAI, SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE. She has received best paper runner-up and outstanding collaboration award from WSDM and Microsoft Research respectively.

Irwin King’s research interests include machine learning, social computing, web intelligence, data mining, and multimedia information processing for Big Data. In these research areas, he has over 200 technical publications in journals and conferences. In addition, he has contributed over 30 book chapters and edited volumes.

Prof. King is the Book Series Editor for Social Media and Social Computing with Taylor and Francis (CRC Press). He is also an Associate Editor of the Neural Network Journal and ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (ACM TKDD). Currently, he is a member of the Board of Governors of INNS and a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of APNNA. He also serves INNS as the Vice-President for Membership in the Board of Governors. Moreover, he is the General Chair of WSDM2011, General Co-Chair of RecSys2013, ACML2015, and in various capacities in a number of top conferences such as WWW, NIPS, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, etc.

Prof. King is Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Engineering and Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also Director of the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Rich Media and Big Data. He received his B.Sc. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He was on leave to AT&T Labs Research on special projects and also taught courses at UC Berkeley on Social Computing and Data Mining. Recently, Prof. King has been an evangelist in the use of education technologies in eLearning for the betterment of teaching and learning.

Dr. Sung-Hyon Myaeng is currently a professor in School of Computer Science at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he created the Web Science & Technology Division. He is also the Director of KAIST-Microsoft Research Collaboration Center (KMCC). Previously he was on the faculty at Syracuse University, USA, where he was granted tenure in 1994. He earned his MS and Ph. D. from Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

His research has been in the intersection between lexical & semantic aspects in natural language processing and unconventional search techniques in information retrieval, currently focusing on various text mining problems such as human experience mining, trend analysis, & open information extraction with mobile and context-aware applications. He recently published the book “Experiential Knowledge Mining”.

He has served on program committees of many reputable international conferences in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, and Word Wide Web, including his role as a co-program chair for ACM SIGIR, 2002 and 2008. In 2008, he won an award from Microsoft Research, based on global competition for the RFP “Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics”. He now serves as Associate Vice President of International Office at KAIST.

Prof. Min Song is the Underwood Distinguished Professor at Yonsei University and a Professor of the Department of Library and Information Science and the director of Text and Social Media Mining Lab at Yonsei University. Prior to Yonsei, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Min received the best paper award from EDB in 2013, the outstanding service award from CIKM in 2009. His work received an honorable mention award in the 2006 Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Symposium and the Drexel Best Dissertation Award in 2005. He has published 150 journal and conference papers. Min has research interests in Biomedical Text Mining, Social Media Data Mining, and Information Retrieval. He received his PhD in Information Systems from Drexel University, a MA from Indiana University and a BA from Yonsei University in Korea.

ChengXiang Zhai is a Professor of Computer Science and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he also holds a joint appointment at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and School of Information Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, biomedical and health informatics, and intelligent education systems. He has published over 200 papers in these areas with high citations. He served as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Information Processing and Management, and Program Co-Chair of NAACL HLT 2007, ACM SIGIR 2009, and WWW 2015. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and received a number of awards, including ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award (three times), the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Award, Microsoft Beyond Search Research Award, UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence, and UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. He has two MOOCs on Coursera on Text Retrieval and Text Mining, respectively.

Taifeng Wang is a lead researcher in Machine Learning group, Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include machine learning, distributed system, search ads click prediction, graph mining. many of his technologies have been transferred to Microsoft’s products and online services, such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, and Azure. Currently, he is working on distributed machine learning, and leading Microsoft’s open source project DMTK (Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit). He has published tens of papers at top conference and journals and served as the PC member of many premium conferences such as KDD, WWW, SIGIR, IJCAI, and WSDM. He has been tutorial speakers in WWW 2011, SIGIR 2012 and ACML2016, and he has organized a workshop on Deep learning in WSDM 2015.

Dit-Yan Yeung received his BEng degree in electrical engineering and MPhil degree in computer science from the University of Hong Kong, and PhD degree in computer science from the University of Southern California. He started his academic career as an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Currently he is a professor of computer science and engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are in computational and statistical approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence as well as novel application of machine learning techniques to computer vision and e-learning.

Masashi Sugiyama received the PhD degree in Computer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan in 2001. Since 2014 he has been Professor at the University of Tokyo. From 2016, he concurrently serves as Director of RIKEN Center for Advanced Integrated Intelligence Research.

Dr. Tao Qin is a Lead Researcher in Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include machine learning (with the focus on deep learning and reinforcement learning), artificial intelligence (with applications to chatbots and emotional intelligence), game theory (with applications to cloud computing, online and mobile advertising, ecommerce), information retrieval and computational advertising. He got his PhD degree and Bachelor degree both from Tsinghua University. He is a member of ACM and IEEE, and an Adjunct Professor (PhD advisor) in the University of Science and Technology of China.

Dr. Kwok is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He served / is serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and the Neurocomputing journal. He has been program chair, area chair and keynote speaker for many international conferences. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA).

Chih-Jen Lin is currently a distinguished professor at the Department of Computer Science, National Taiwan University. He obtained his B.S. degree from National Taiwan University in 1993 and Ph.D. degree from University of Michigan in 1998. His major research areas include machine learning, data mining, and numerical optimization. He is best known for his work on support vector machines (SVM) for data classification. His software LIBSVM is one of the most widely used and cited SVM packages. For his research work he has received many awards, including the ACM KDD 2010 and ACM RecSys 2013 best paper awards. He is an IEEE fellow, a AAAI fellow, and an ACM fellow for his contribution to machine learning algorithms and software design. More information about him can be found at this LINK (opens in new tab).

Kyoung Mu Lee received the B.S. and M.S. Degrees in Control and Instrumentation Eng. from Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1993. He is currently with the Dept. of ECE at Seoul National University as a professor. Prof. Lee has received several awards, in particular, the Most Influential Paper over the Decade Award by the IAPR Machine Vision Application in 2009, the ACCV Honorable Mention Award in 2007, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant Award in 2006, the Distinguished Professor Award and Outstanding Research Award from the college of Engineering of SNU in 2009 and 2010, respectively. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE TPAMI, an Area Editor of the CVIU, and has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TPAMI, the Machine Vision Application Journal and the IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications, and the IEEE Signal Processing Letter. He also has served (or will serve) as a General Chair of ICCV2019, ACM MM2018, Program Chair of ACCV2012, a Track Chair of ICPR2012, a Workshop Chair of ICCV2013, and Area Char of CVPR, ICCV, ECCV many times. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) for 2012-2013. More information can be found on his homepage http://cv.snu.ac.kr/kmlee.

Yu-Gang Jiang is a Professor in School of Computer Science and Vice Director of Shanghai Engineering Research Center for Video Technology and System at Fudan University, China. His Lab for Big Video Data Analytics conducts research on all aspects of extracting high-level information from big video data, such as video event recognition, object/scene recognition and large-scale visual search. He is the lead architect of a few best-performing video analytic systems in worldwide competitions such as the annual U.S. NIST TRECVID evaluation. His visual concept detector library (VIREO-374) and video datasets (e.g., CCV and FCVID) are widely used resources in the research community. His work has led to many awards, including “emerging leader in multimedia” award from IBM T.J. Watson Research in 2009, early career faculty award from Intel and China Computer Federation in 2013, the 2014 ACM China Rising Star Award, and the 2015 ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from City University of Hong Kong and spent three years working at Columbia University before joining Fudan in 2011.

Tatsuya Harada is a Professor in the Department of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. His research interests center on a large-scale visual recognition, caption generation from visual information, automatic contents generation and intelligent robot using machine learning. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2001. He was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 before joining the University of Tokyo in 2001. He is the recipient of Grand Challenge Special Prize on the Best Application of a Theoretical Framework at ACM Multimedia in 2011. He won the fine-grained classification task and the second place in the classification task at ILSVRC in 2012. He won the Visual Question Answering (VQA) challenge (Abstract Scenes) at CVPR in 2016.

Dr. Jun Yan received the Ph.D. degree in digital signal processing and pattern recognition from the department of information science, school of mathematical science, Peking University, P.R. China. During his Ph.D., he has been a research intern of MSRA from 2003 to 2005 and awarded as Microsoft fellow in 2004. Before join Microsoft, he has been a research associate at CBI, HMS, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, in 2005. He joined Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) from 2006. Currently he is working in the Data Mining and Enterprise Intelligence group of MSRA as a senior research manager.

His research interests are on knowledge mining for AI, text data preprocessing, information retrieval and behavior targeted online advertising etc. So far, he has successfully incubated tens of technologies, which have been used in Microsoft products. In academia, he has more than 60 quality papers published in referred conferences and journals, including SIGKDD, SIGIR, WWW, ICDM, TKDE, etc. He has been the PC members of international conferences SIGKDD, SIGIR etc. and is also reviewers of journals articles TKDE, TPAMI etc.

Juanzi Li is a full professor from the department of computer science and technology at Tsinghua university. Her research interest is semantic Web and knowledge base building. She is the chair of Knowledge and Language Computing Committee at the Chinese Information Processing Society of China. She is the principal investigator of many important projects supported Natural Science Foundation of China, the framework of EU cooperation projects (FP7), and etc. She has published over 90 papers in top international conferences and journals such as WWW, ACL, SIGIR, IJCAI, TKDE and TKDD. She won Wang Xuan News Science and Technology Award in 2009 and 2011(the first and second prize respectively), 2013 Scientific Innovation Award in Artificial Intelligence Community in China (the first prize).

Huajun Chen is a full professor of college of computer science, Zhejiang University, China. He is serving as the deputy-director of Key Lab of Big Data Computing of Zhejiang Province, and associate editor of Elsevier Journal of Big Data Research. His research interests are on the Semantic Web, Knowledge Graph, Ontologies and their applications such as biomedicine, smart cities, etc. He once won the best paper award in ISWC2006 (International Semantic Web Conference), and has published papers in referred conferences and journals including AAAI/IAAI, WWW, ICDE, TKDE , IEEE Magazine on Computational Intelligence, Briefings in bioinformatics, etc.

Dr. Tim Pan is outreach senior 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.

Juliana Freire is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. She is the Executive Director of the NYU Moore Sloan Data Science Environment. She holds an appointment at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science, is a faculty member at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and at the NYU Center of Data Science, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies. Her recent research has focused on big-data analysis and visualization, large-scale information integration, provenance management, and computational reproducibility. Prof. Freire is an active member of the database and Web research communities, with over 150 technical papers, several open-source systems, and 11 U.S. patents. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. She has chaired or co-chaired several workshops and conferences, and participated as a program committee member in over 70 events. Her research grants are from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, the University of Utah, New York University, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM.

Fred B. Schneider is Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and chair of the department. He joined Cornell’s faculty in Fall 1978, having completed a Ph.D. at Stony Brook University and a B.S. in Engineering at Cornell in 1975. Schneider’s research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On Concurrent Programming and (co-authored with D. Gries) A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He is also known for his research in theory and algorithms for building fault-tolerant distributed systems.

His paper on the “state machine approach” for managing replication received (in 2007) an SOSP “Hall of Fame” award for seminal research. More recently, his interests have turned to system security. His work characterizing what policies can be enforced with various classes of defenses is widely cited, and it is seen as advancing the nascent science base for security. He is also engaged in research concerning legal and economic measures for improving system trustworthiness.

Schneider was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992), the Association of Computing Machinery (1995), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2008). He was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security. He received the 2012 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for “contributions to trustworthy computing through novel approaches to security, fault-tolerance and formal methods for concurrent and distributed systems”. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, and the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010.

Schneider is a frequent consultant to industry, believing this to be an efficient method of technology transfer and a good way to learn about the real problems. He provides technical expertise in fault-tolerance and computer security to a variety of other firms, including Intel, Lincoln Laboratories, and Riskive. In addition, Schneider has testified about cybersecurity research at hearings of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee (subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats, and Capabilities), as well as the Committee on Science and Technology (subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and subcommittee on Research and Science Education).

Dr. Xiaofan Wang received the B. Sc degree in mathematics from Suzhou University in 1986, the M. Sc degree in computational mathematics from Nanjing Normal University in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree from Southeast University in 1996. From Oct., 1996 to Dec., 2001, I had been worked at Nanjing University of Science & Technology, City University of Hong Kong and University of Bristol. I have been a Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) since 2002 and a Distinguished Professor of SJTU since 2008.

I received the 2002 National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of P. R. China, the 2005 Guillemin-Cauer Best Transactions Paper Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the 2008 First-Class Prize of Shanghai Natural Science Award, the 2008 Distinguished Professor of the Chaing Jiang Scholars Program, Ministry of Education, and the 2010 Peony Prize for Natural Science Researchers in Shanghai.

Sue Moon received her B.S. and M.S. from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1988 and 1990, respectively, all in computer engineering. She received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in the IPMON project at Sprint ATL in Burlingame, California. In August of 2003, she joined KAIST and now teaches in Daejeon, Korea. Her research interests are: online social networks and networking systems.

Alice Oh is an associate professor in the School of Computing at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She heads the Users and Information Lab with the vision of developing machine learning models to better analyze and understand users and their needs for information.

Seungjin Choi received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1996. He was with the Laboratory for Artificial Brain Systems, RIKEN, Japan, in 1997 and was an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Chungbuk National University from 1997 to 2000. Since 2001, he has been a Professor of Computer Science at POSTECH, Korea. He also leads the Machine Learning Center supported by Korea Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. His primary research interests include probabilistic models and Bayesian inference, recently deep generative models.

Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng is a Principal Research Manager overseeing the Internet Media Group and the Media Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia. He was with the Univ. of Missouri (MU) from 2003 to 2016, most recently as a Full Professor. He had worked for PacketVideo Corp., Sharp Labs of America, Bell Labs, and Panasonic Technology prior to joining MU. Wenjun has contributed significantly to the development of international standards (ISO MPEG, JPEG2000, and OMA). He 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, computer vision, social network/media analysis, multimedia communications, and content/network security.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia Magazine, and was an AE of IEEE Trans. on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics & Security, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (TMM). He 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 ICME in 2010 and 2011, and has served as the TPC 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 an IEEE Communications Magazine Special Issue on Impact of Next-Generation Mobile Technologies on IoT-Cloud Convergence and a TCSVT Special Issue on Visual Computing in the Cloud – Mobile Computing, and was a Special Issue Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE TMM, and ACM TOMCCAP.

Gunhee Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Seoul National University from 2015. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Disney Research for one and a half years. He received his PhD in 2013 under supervision of Eric P. Xing from Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting PhD study in 2009, he earned a master’s degree under supervision of Martial Hebert in Robotics Institute, CMU. His research interests are solving computer vision and web mining problems that emerge from big image data shared online, by developing scalable and effective machine learning and optimization techniques. He is a recipient of 2014 ACM SIGKDD doctoral dissertation award, and 2015 Naver New faculty award.

Shin’ichi Satoh received his BE degree in Electronics Engineering in 1987, his ME and PhD degrees in Information Engineering in 1989 and 1992 at the University of Tokyo. He joined National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), Tokyo, in 1992. He is a full professor at National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, since 2004. He was a visiting scientist at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, from 1995 to 1997. His research interests include image processing, video content analysis and multimedia database. Currently he is leading the video processing project at NII.

Junsong Yuan is currently an associate professor and program director of video analytics at School EEE, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He received Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His research interests include computer vision, video analytics, gesture and action analysis, large-scale visual search and mining, etc. He is Program Chair of IEEE Conf. on Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP’15), Organizing Co-Chair of Asian Conf. on Computer Vision (ACCV’14), and Area Chair of CVPR’17, ICPR’16, ACCV’14, WACV’14, ICME’14’15. He serves as guest editor of International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), and is currently associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Image Processing (T-IP), IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT) and The Visual Computer journal (TVC). He received Nanyang Assistant Professorship from Nanyang Technological University, Outstanding EECS Ph.D. Thesis award from Northwestern University, Best Paper Award from IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, and Doctoral Spotlight Award from IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’09).

Dr. Xing Xie is currently a senior research manager in Microsoft Research Asia, and a guest Ph.D. advisor for the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in July 2001, working on data mining, social computing and ubiquitous computing. During the past years, he has published over 160 referred journal and conference papers, such as ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Transactions on the Web, ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, etc. He has more than 50 patents filed or granted. He has been invited to give keynote speeches at SocInfo 2015, Socialinformatics 2015, GbR 2015, W2GIS 2011, HotDB 2012, SRSM 2012, etc.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), Springer GeoInformatica, Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Journal of Location Based Services, and Communications of the China Computer Federation (CCCF). In recent years, he was involved in the program or organizing committees of over 70 conferences and workshops. Especially, he initiated the LBSN workshop series and served as program co-chair of ACM Ubicomp 2011, the 8th Chinese Pervasive Computing Conference (PCC 2012) and the 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2015). In Oct. 2009, he founded the SIGSPATIAL China chapter which was the first regional chapter of ACM SIGSPATIAL. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing Conference Series. He is a senior member of ACM and the IEEE, and a distinguished member of China Computer Federation (CCF).

De-Nian Yang received the BS and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University. His research interests include social networks and multimedia networking. He received the best paper awards (or nominates) from PAKDD, IEEE GLOBECOM, ACM CHI, and IEEE ICME. He also received Career Development Award and Junior Research Investigators Award in Academia Sinica, Outstanding Youth Electrical Engineer Award in Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering, K. T. Li Distinguished Young Scholar Award in ACM Taipei/Taiwan Chapter, Excellent Junior Research Investigators in Ministry of Science and Technology and National Science Council, and Research Exploration Award in Pan Wen Yuan Foundation. He is now a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

Tingshao Zhu, PhD, earned his second Ph.D at the University of Alberta Canada in 2006. From 2008, he started working as a Professor at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), and a professor in the Institute of Psychology, CAS from 2012 in Beijing. Dr. Zhu has extensive experience on Data Mining and Machine Learning. His research on Mandarin Text-To-Speech, conducted at the Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, was the first attempt to acquire prosodic patterns using data mining, and several research groups in China are currently extending this research. His proposal of predicting personality/mental health states has defined a new direction for psychology research. The main foci of his current work are (1) user behavior modeling; (2) computational cyberpsychology and (3) data mining.

Dr. Hao Chen is currently an associate professor at Department of Social Psychology of Nan Kai University in China. During the past several years, Prof. Chen has endeavored to integrate informatics technology into the research of psychological science, such as collecting massive data information about human cognition, emotion and behavior online, analyzing the psychological association and underlying mechanism at aggregate level, testing and revising the classical or cutting-edged psychological theories and hypotheses afresh with large-scale dataset. Prof. Chen has published over 40 academic papers concerning psychological or interdisciplinary topics, among which including online collective behavior and emotion, computational behavioral sciences, socioecological psychology, intimate relationships, and evolutionary psychology. Prof. Chen has received the Jung Tae-Gon Young Scholar Awards of the Asian Association of Social Psychology in 2009, nominated the National 100 Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2010, and won the Best Paper Award of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-Cultural Computing in 2015.

Wei Chen (陈薇) is a researcher in Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Her current research interests include: distributed machine learning, deep learning theory, game-theoretic machine learning, mechanism design, and learning to rank. Before she joined Microsoft in July 2011, she obtained her Ph. D. in probability and mathematic statistics from Academy of Mathematics and System Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Hwanjo Yu received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at June 2004 under the supervision of Prof. Jiawei Han. From July 2004 to January 2008, he had been an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. He is now an associate professor at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology). He developed influential algorithms and systems in the areas of big data and machine learning, including (1) algorithms for classifying without negative data (PEBL,SVMC), (2) privacy-preserving SVM algorithms (PP-SVM), (3) SVM-JAVA: an educational java open source for SVM, (4) RefMed: the relevance feedback search engine for PubMed, and (5) TurboGraph: a fast parallel graph engine handling billion-scale graphs in a single PC. His methods and algorithms were published in prestigious journals and conferences including ACM KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, IEEE ICDM, ACM CIKM, etc.

Zhang Wensheng, research professor, Assistant Chief Engineer and doctoral advisor at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA). He also serves as Chair Professor and PhD supervisor at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), professor and PhD supervisor at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NJUST).

His recent fields of research include: artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, big data and data mining, embedded video image processing. He is the judge for China National Science & Technology Awards, member of the group of experts in Cloud Computing and Big Data sector of the National Science and Technology Major Project, member of National Defense Science Research team, Secretary of Human-computer Interface Committee at Chinese Association of Automation, and the member of Chinese Big Data Expert Committee. He has presided and completed over nine Key Projects and General Programs supported by National Natural Science Foundation, seven National High-tech R&D Program of China (863 Program), and two National Program on Key Basic Research Project (973 Program). He has published over 130 papers in journals and conferences, and is the inventor of over 20 patents.

Gang Hua is a Senior Research Manager of the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia. He was an Associate Professor of Computer Science in Stevens Institute of Technology between 2011 and 2015. He held an Academic Advisor position at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 2011 and 2014. He was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Summer 2013, and a Consulting Researcher at Microsoft Research in Summer 2012. He had also worked as full-time Researchers at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Nokia Research Center Hollywood, and Microsoft Live Labs Research. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University in 2006.

His research in computer vision studies the interconnections and synergies among the visual data, the semantic and situated context, and the users in the expanded physical world, which can be categorized into three themes: human centered visual computing, big visual data analytics, and vision based cyber-physical systems. He is the author of more than 100 peer reviewed publications in prestigious international journals and conferences. His research was funded by NSF, NIH, ARO, ONR, Adobe Research, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and NEC Labs. He is the recipient of the 2015 IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award, and is elected as an IAPR Fellow in the 2016 class. To date, he holds 18 U.S. patents and has more than 10 U.S. patents pending. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a life member of the ACM.

Xiaogang Wang received his Bachelor degree in Electronic Engineering and Information Science from the Special Class of Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China in 2001, M. Phil. degree in Information Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2004, and PhD degree in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He is an associate professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since August 2009. He received PAMI Young Research Award Honorable Mention in 2016, the Outstanding Young Researcher in Automatic Human Behaviour Analysis Award in 2011, Hong Kong RGC Early Career Award in 2012, and Young Researcher Award of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the associate editor of the Image and Visual Computing Journal, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, IEEE Transactions on Circuit Systems and Video Technology. He was the area chair of ICCV 2011, ICCV 2015, ECCV 2014, ECCV 2016, ACCV 2014, and ACCV 2015. His research interests include computer vision, deep learning, crowd video surveillance, object detection, and face recognition.

Dr. Xilin Chen is a professor with Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF). Dr. Xilin Chen is / was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia / Image Processing. He is now a leading editor of Journal of Computer Science of Technology, and the associate editor in chief of the Chinese Journal of Computer. He served as general chair of IEEE FG 2013, program chair of ACM ICMI 2010, tutorial chair of IEEE FG 2011, publicity chair of ACM ICMI 2015, workshop chair of ACM ICMI 2009, demo chair of ACM ICMI 2006, and local chair of IEEE ICIP 2017, ACM MM 2009 and ICME 2007. Dr. Xilin Chen’s research interests include Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, and Multimodal Interface. He is a recipient of one China’s State Natural Science Award (2015) and four China’s State Scientific and Technological Progress Awards (2012, 2005, 2003, and 2000).

Sudipta Sinha is a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. He received his PhD in 2009 under the guidance of Dr. Marc Pollefeys from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests lie broadly in computer vision and robotics. He has been working on correspondence estimation in images and video, structure from motion, stereo matching, dense 3d reconstruction, image-based rendering, visual place recognition and visual odometry. He was part of the team from UNC Chapel Hill that received the best demo award at CVPR 2007 for their real-time urban 3d reconstruction system and contributed towards the development of Microsoft Photosynth and Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro.

Dr. Yu Zheng is a research manager from Microsoft Research, passionate about using big data to tackle urban challenges. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. He is also the founding Secretary of SIGKDD China Chapter and has served as chair on over 10 prestigious international conferences, e.g. as the program co-chair of ICDE 2014 (Industrial Track). Zheng received five best paper awards from ICDE’13 and ACM SIGSPATIAL10, etc. His book, titled Computing with Spatial Trajectories, has been used as a text book in universities world-widely and awarded the Top 10 Most Popular Computer Science Book authored by Chinese at Springer. In 2013, he was named one of the Top Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review (TR35) and featured by Time Magazine for his research on urban computing. Zheng is also a visiting Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an Adjunct Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Hideyuki Tokuda obtained his B.S. (1975), M.S. (1977) from Keio University and Ph.D. (Computer Science) (1983) from University of Waterloo, Canada, respectively. He is currently Director of Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Laboratory and a Professor of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Japan. In 1983, he joined School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Research Computer Scientist in 1991. Since 1990, he joined Keio University. He was Associate Professor (1990-1996), Executive Vice President (1997-2001), Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance (2001-2007), Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies (2007-2009), and Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance (2009-2015) in Keio.

After he completed Ph.D., he joined School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and worked on distributed real-time operating systems such as Real-Time Mach, the ARTS Kernel. In 1990, he came back to Keio University. His research and teaching interests include ubiquitous computing systems, operating systems, decentralized autonomous systems, sensor networks, IoT/CPS and smart cities. He has created many ubiquitous computing platforms such as Smart Space Lab., Smart Furniture, uPhoto, uTexture and uPlatea. Because of his research contribution, he was awarded Motorola Foundation Award (89), IBM Faculty Award (02), Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Award (04) and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication Award (05), KEIO-Gijyuku Award (06), IPSJ Achievement Award (2011), Information Security Cultural Award (15).

He is a member of Science Council of Japan, a former vice president of IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan), IPSJ Fellow, JSSST (Japan Society for Software Science and Technology) Fellow, JST Special appointment Fellow and a member of ACM, IEEE, IPSJ, IEICE and JSSST.

Minyi Guo is currently Zhiyuan Chair professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China. Before joined SJTU, Dr. Guo had been a professor of the school of computer science and engineering, University of Aizu, Japan. Dr. Guo received the national science fund for distinguished young scholars from NSFC in 2007, and was supported by “1000 recruitment program of China” in 2010. His present research interests include parallel/distributed computing, compiler optimizations, embedded systems, pervasive computing, and cloud computing. He has more than 300 publications in major journals and international conferences in these areas. He is now on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Dr. Guo is a senior member of IEEE.

Vincent S. Tseng is currently a Distinguished Professor at Department of Computer Science in National Chiao Tung University and director of Center for Big Data Technologies and Innovations. He served as the chair for IEEE CIS Tainan Chapter during 2013-2015 and the president of Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence during 2011-2012. He also acted as the director for Institute of Medical Informatics of National Cheng Kung University during 2008 and 2011. During February 2004 and July 2007, he had also served as the director for Informatics Center in National Cheng Kung University Hospital. Dr. Tseng received his Ph.D. degree with major in computer science from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 1997. After that, he joined Computer Science Division of University of California at Berkeley as a postdoctoral research fellow during 1998-1999. He has a wide variety of research interests covering data mining, big data, biomedical informatics, mobile and social networks. He has published more than 300 research papers in referred journals and conferences as well as 15 patents (held and filed). He has been on the editorial board of a number of top journals including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, etc. He has also served as chairs/program committee members for a number of premier international conferences related to data mining and intelligent computing, including KDD, ICDM, SDM, PAKDD, ICDE, CIKM, IJCAI, etc. In recent years, Dr. Tseng has also served on overseeing the architect on Big Data technologies and applications for the governmental and industrial units in Taiwan. Dr. Tseng has received a number of awards, including 2014 K. T. Li Breakthrough Award (only one recipient annually in Taiwan) and 2015 Outstanding Research Award by Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan.

Dr. Wei-Ying Ma is an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia where he oversees multiple research groups including Web Search and Mining, Natural Language Computing, Data Management and Analytics, and Internet Economics and Computational Advertising. He and his team of researchers have developed many key technologies that have been transferred to Microsoft’s Online Services Division including Bing Search Engine and Microsoft Advertising. He has published more than 250 papers at international conferences and journals. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM. He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information System (TOIS) and ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. He is a member of International World Wide Web (WWW) Conferences Steering Committee. In recent years, he served as program co-chair of WWW 2008, program co-chair of Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM) 2007, general co-chair of Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) 2008, and the general co-chair of ACM SIGIR 2011.

Before joining Microsoft in 2001, Wei-Ying was with Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California where he worked in the fields of multimedia content analysis and adaptation. From 1994 to 1997, he was engaged in the Alexandria Digital Library project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He 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.