Microsoft Research Asia Ph.D. Forum 2017

Justin Ding is a researcher in the Software Analytics group in Microsoft Research Asia. He joined MSRA in July 2010, before that, he received his BS degree from Academic Talent Program of Tsinghua University in 2007, and got MS degree from Department of Automation of Tsinghua University in 2010.

His research interests focus on smart data analytics, especially on data mining and insight discovery from multi-dimensional data.

Start from 2014, Justin has been working on the research and tech-transfer of Auto-Insights as a key contributor. A series of features have been shipped to the product of Microsoft PowerBI since 2015, including Quick-Insights, Scoped-Insights, Summary-Insights, Why-Analysis, etc., which facilities automated data analysis with real time experience.

During his early years in MSRA (2010 ~ 2014), he mainly focused on data mining for large-scale software systems.

Jing is currently a researcher in Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Before she joined MSRA in Dec. 2015, she received her dual Ph.D. degrees from Zhejiang University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Jinhui Yu and Prof. Pedro V. Sander.

Her research interests include image and video processing, computational photography, non-photo-realistic rendering.

Tao Mei is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research Asia. His current research interests include multimedia analysis and understanding, computer vision, and machine learning. He is leading a team working on image and video analysis, vision and language, and multimedia search. Tao has shipped a dozen inventions and technologies to Microsoft products, such as Windows Photo, Bing, Office, Azure, OneDrive, Cognitive Services, Chat Bot, Cognitive Services, etc. He has authored or co-authored over 100 papers (with an h-index of 43) in journals and conferences, 10 book chapters, and edited four books. He holds over 40 US and international patents (with 18 granted).

Dr. Tim Pan is Director of Microsoft Research Connections at Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the lab’s academic collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region.

Tim Pan earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He had 20 years of experience in the computer industry and co-founded two technology companies in smart card IC and large banking systems. Tim joined MSRA in 2005-2007 and rejoined in 2012.

Tim has great passion for talent-fostering. He served as a board member of St. John’s University (Taiwan) for 10 years, offered courses and gave lectures in high-tech venture and various CS-related subjects and wrote a best-selling textbook in information security. Tim is a CISSP and holds several other industrial licenses.

Dr. Tao Qin is currently 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 robotics), 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. 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 MobiQuitous 2016, SocInfo 2015, Socialinformatics 2015, GbR 2015, W2GIS 2011, HotDB 2012, SRSM 2012, etc.

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.

Ying Yan is currently working as a Lead Researcher in Cloud Computing Group, MSRA. She got her PhD degree in computer science from Fudan University. She was MSRA PhD fellow. She has 26 publications on the top Database conferences. Before joining MSRA, she also had more than two years working experience in Bing indexserve team.

Her current research interest includes big data analytic, database optimization and Blockchain technology.

Fan Yang is a researcher at the Systems Research Group in Microsoft Research Asia. Previously, he was affiliated with the Wireless and Networking Group in MSRA from 2004 to 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University.

His research interests include distributed systems, mobile systems, Internet architecture and protocols, and wireless media communications. He built a few distributed graph engines, among other things.

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

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

He received his Ph.D. at University of Toronto under the supervision by Prof. Khai N. Truong at Dynamic Graphics Project. His research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, his current research focuses on novel applications over emerging information infrastructure, such as AI and IoT systems. In particular, his research emphasizes on development and evaluations of sensing technologies to enable new applications for mobile/wearable devices, productivity/creativity support, and interactive systems to encourage user behavior changes. Besides HCI and ubiquitous computing, he is interested in machine learning, statistical analysis, computational linguistics, psychology, and physiology.

Yizhong Zhang is an associate researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Zhejiang University 2016. His research interests include physically based simulation, computer graphics, computational fabrication and robotics.