Lei Zhang

Lei Zhang is a principal researcher and research manager in Microsoft AI & Research, leading a team working on visual recognition and computer vision.

Prior to this, he has worked with Microsoft Research Asia for 12 years as a senior researcher, leading a research team working on visual recognition, image analysis, and large-scale data mining. His years of work on large-scale, search-based image annotation has generated many practical impacts in multimedia search, including a highly scalable solution of duplicate image clustering for billions of images. From 2013 to 2015, he moved to Bing Multimedia Search as a principal development manager, helping develop cutting-edge solutions for web-scale image analysis and recognition problems, including image caption generation and high precision image entity linking.

Lei is a senior IEEE member and a senior ACM member, and has served as editorial board members for Multimedia System Journal, as program co-chairs, area chairs, or committee members for many top conferences. He is the author or co-author of 100+ published papers in fields such as multimedia, computer vision, web search and information retrieval, and holds 40+ U.S. patents for his innovation in these fields.

Lei earned all his degrees (B.E., M.E., and Ph.D) in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and currently also holds an adjunct professor position in Tianjin University.