Brain & Neuroscience Workshop 2023

Dongqi Han, MSR Asia

Dongqi Han got B.S. degree in physics from university of science and technology of China and Ph.D. degree from Okinawa institute of science and technology. He joined MSRA Shanghai lab in 2022 as a researcher. Dongqi is interested in artificial and biological neural networks and the interaction between deep learning and neuroscience.

Miran Lee (opens in new tab), MSR Asia

Miran Lee is a Director of Microsoft Research Outreach Group at Microsoft Research responsible for academic collaboration in Korea and the Asia-Pacific region. Miran joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2005 as a university relations manager to build long-term and mutually beneficial relations with academia. She is based in Korea, where she engages with leading research universities, research institutes, and relevant government agencies. She establishes strategies and directions, identifies business opportunities, designs various programs and projects, and manages the budget. She works with students, researchers, faculty members, and university administrators to build strong partnerships, and works closely with the research groups at Microsoft Research, focusing on research collaboration, curriculum development, talent fostering, and academic exchanges. She has successfully run many global and regional programs such as Gaming & Graphics, Web-Scale NLP, Machine Translation, eHealth, SORA (Software Radio), Kinect, Microsoft Azure for Research, and Contents Creation. She’s currently leading 2 themes, ‘Discovery’ and ’Health and Life Science’ as a member of global v-team.

Before her current role, Miran Lee co-founded Smart Systems, which specializes in IT outsourcing services in Illinois, United States. As CEO of Smart Systems, she successfully led the business with more than 100 percent annual growth. From 1993 to 2002, she worked at British Telecom Korea in various positions ranging from systems engineer to account director to vice president. Lee also worked at Samsung SDS, where she was responsible for International VAN (Value Added Network) businesses and led the International VAN business team. She started her business career as a system developer at General Electric Information Services, where she developed email, EDI, and in-house applications. Miran Lee was an adjunct professor in the Telecommunication Department at Anyang University for two years (2001–2002).

Sang Wan Lee (opens in new tab), KAIST

Sang Wan Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at KAIST, a faculty member of the Program of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, KAIST Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and KAIST Institute for Health, Science, and Technology. He is a founding director of the KAIST Center for Neuroscience-inspired Artificial Intelligence. He served as the head of the Program of Brain and Cognitive Engineering during 2021-2023.”

Dr. Lee received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from KAIST in 2009, working with Zeungnam Bien. He was a postdoctoral associate at MIT, working with Tomaso Poggio, followed by a Della Martin postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, working with John O’Doherty and Shinsuke Shimojo.

He is the recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award (2016) and IBM Academic Awards (2021). I also won a few awards from KAIST, including KAIST Songam Distinguished Research Award (2019), KAIST Institute Faculty Award (2019), and KAIST International Cooperation Award (2022).

His research focuses on understanding how the brain learns and makes inferences. To address this question, He has put together ideas from developing fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. The approach is two-fold: 1) “Brain↦AI” aimed at understanding how the brain learns from a machine learning standpoint, and 2) “AI↦Brain” aimed at understanding why such neural processes occur.

Dongsheng Li, MSR Asia

Dongsheng Li is a principal research manager with Microsoft Research Asia, Shanghai, China. Meanwhile, he is an adjunct professor with School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He obtained Ph.D. from school of computer science, Fudan University in 2012, and B.E. from department of computer science and technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2007.

His research interests focus on machine learning and its applications. For machine learning research, he is interested to recommendation algorithms, responsible AI, bio-inspired neural network, graph neural network, computer vision, sequential learning, reinforcement learning and fundamental technologies for speech and natural language processing. For machine learning applications, he is interested to applying AI for healthcare realted problems, e.g., AI-assisted medical diagnosis, prediction based on bio-medical graphs, etc.

Jun Tani (opens in new tab), Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)

Jun Tani received the D.Eng. degree from Sophia University, Tokyo in 1995. He started his research career with Sony Computer Science Lab. in 1993. He became a PI in RIKEN Brain Science Institute in 2001. He became a Professor at KAIST, South Korea in 2012. He is currently a Professor at OIST. He is also a visiting professor of the Technical University of Munich. His current research interests include cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, phenomenology, complex adaptive systems, and robotics. He is an author of “Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena.” published from Oxford Univ. Press in 2016.

Yuguo Yu (opens in new tab), Fudan University

Yuguo Yu is a full professor at the Research Institute of Intelligent and Complex Systems, Fudan University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Nanjing University in 2001, and conducted postdoctoral research in Computational Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University (2001 – 2004). He was later employed as an Associate Research Scientist at the medical school of Yale University (2005 – 2012). Dr. Yu’s research focuses on the mechanisms of neural information processing and dynamics, large-scale spiking neural network modeling, neuro-energetics, and brain-inspired intelligence. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal papers in prestigious publications such as Nature, PNAS, Neuron, Physical Review Letters, J Neurosci, PLoS Comp Biol, among others. He has been awarded the Professorship of Eastern Scholar at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning in 2013 and 2017, as well as the Shanghai Excellent Academic Leader award in 2021.

Weilong Zheng (opens in new tab), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) & MSR Asia

Wei-Long Zheng is a tenured-track Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He was a postdoc associate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and a research fellow in the Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, USA. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science with Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received ACM Multimedia Top Paper Award 2022, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing Best Paper Award 2021, and IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development Outstanding Paper Award 2018. His research focuses on computational neuroscience, affective computing, brain-computer interfaces, and machine learning.