Beibei Shi, Senior Research PM, Microsoft Research Asia
Beibei Shi is senior research program manager at Microsoft Research Asia, taking the responsibility of MSR Asia Open Collaborative Research Program and StarTrack Program, as well as university relations between MSR Asia and universities in Central China, South China, China Hongkong and Taiwan. Besides, she takes the responsibility of the strategic cooperation between Microsoft Research Asia and the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. She focuses on the research theme of Resilience and Trust, has successfully led several open collaborative research sub-themes establishment with related MSR Asia research team, such as AIER Platform, OpenNetLab, Computing for Carbon Negative and Responsible AI.
Before joined MSR Asia, she joined IBM Research China Institute as a researcher in the cross field of environment and computer, after earned master’s degree in environmental science school of China Agricultural University in 2019. Then, she joined the University Partnership Department of IBM China as a program manager. During that period, she participated to design and led to execute industry-academic cooperative research program “green horizon plan”, making very solid contribution to technology innovation of air pollution control.
Doug Burger, TF & CVP, MSR CORE
Doug Burger is one of the world’s leading active researchers in computer architecture, with a broad set of important contributions to his credit. After receiving his PhD from University of Wisconsin in 1998, he joined UT Austin as a professor, receiving tenure in 2004 and becoming a full professor in 2008. His work on Explicit Data Graph Computing (EDGE) represents the fourth major class of instruction-set architectures (after CISC, RISC, and VLIW). At U. Texas, he co-led the project that conceived and built the TRIPS processor, an ambitious multicore ASIC and working EDGE system, which remains one of the most complex microprocessor prototypes ever built in academia. A number of Doug’s research contributions, such as non-uniform cache architectures (NUCA caches), are now shipping in Intel, ARM, and IBM microprocessors. He has been recognized as an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, and in 2006 received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for his early contributions to the field. He is the co-inventor of more than fifty U.S. patents, including six with Bill Gates.
Fangzhao Wu, Principle Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
Fangzhao Wu is now a researcher at Social Computing group, Microsoft Research Asia. His research mainly focuses on responsible AI, especially LLM safety, privacy, copyright, and social impact.
Fengli Xu (opens in new tab), Assistant Professor, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University
Dr. Fengli Xu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University. Prior to current position, he was a postdoc researcher at the University of Chicago and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area of Artificial Intelligence, LLM Agents, Social Computing and Network Science. His recent research focuses on designing novel agentic workflows to fully exploit the opportunities offered by the advent of behavioral big data and Large Language Models, pushing forward the boundary of agentic AI and computational social science. Dr. Xu’s works have been published in several high-profile interdisciplinary journals—PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and Nature Computational Science, and 40+ top data science conferences and journals, e.g., NeurIPS, WWW, KDD, etc. His research was recognized by selective academic awards, including CAAI AI Excellent Young Scientist Award, CAAI rising star in social computing, MSRA Fellowship, ACM Sigspatial China Doctoral Dissertation Award, etc. Dr. Xu has served as the (senior) PC Member of WWW, AAAI, WSDM and IJCAI and co-organize IC2S2 2022 as Datathon director.
Hiroki Habuka (opens in new tab) (Online), Research Professor, Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University
Hiroki Habuka is a Research Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University, and the CEO of Smart Governance. He specializes in agile governance, a multi-stakeholder and distributed governance model that integrates regulation, corporate governance, and system risk management, particularly in the field of AI and data. He also serves as the representative director of the AI Governance Association, which is the largest non-profit organization in Japan focused on the responsible development and implementation of AI. He also consults for leading companies, guiding the implementation of effective digital governance practices. In 2020, the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils on Agile Governance and Apolitical named him one of the World’s 50 Most Influential People Revolutionising Government (Agile 50). Hiroki holds a Master’s degree in Law (LL.M., Fulbright Fellow) from Stanford Law School, a Juris Doctor from the University of Tokyo Law School, and is qualified to practice law in Japan and New York State. He is the author of a book “Introduction to AI Governance: From Risk Management to Social Design.” (2023)
Jacki O’Neill, Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi
Dr Jacki O’Neill is the founding Director of Microsoft Research Africa (formerly MARI). She is passionate about designing technologies which enhance, rather than remove, agency and create sustainable futures. She brings this passion to Microsoft Research Africa where she is building a multi-disciplinary team, combining research, engineering and design to solve local problems globally. An ethnographer by trade, in her research career so far she has focused on technologies for work – with the aim of making work better; and technologies for societal impact, with the aim of supporting underserved communities. The inspiration for MARI came out of this desire to create technologies to enhance work and society globally. Before leading the MARI, she was a Principal Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) area at Microsoft Research India. She has led major research projects in the future of work from new labour platforms to workplace AI and chat; digital currencies and financial inclusion; and Global Healthcare. She has ~50 peer-reviewed articles, two innovation awards and 16 patents (from new interaction mechanisms to crowd-sourcing). . She has served on the program and organising committees of major conferences such as CHI, CSCW, ICTD and ECSCW for many years.
Jianxun Lian, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
Jianxun Lian is now a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include Humanoid AI, LLM-based Agent, and Recommendation Systems. He has published some academic papers on top international conferences such as KDD, IJCAI, and WWW. He serves as a program committee member for several conferences such as KDD, SIGIR, WWW, AAAI, and IJCAI.
Jing Yao, Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
Jing Yao is now a researcher at Social Computing Group in Microsoft Research Asia. She received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from Renmin University of China in 2022, and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Renmin University of China in 2019. She joined MSRA in July 2022. Her research interests include responsible AI, large language model alignment, trustworthy recommendation and information retrieval. She has published some academic papers on top-tier international conferences such as Neurips, SIGIR, WWW, NAACL, CIKM. She serves as a program committee member for several conferences such as ACL, ICLR and SIGIR.
Jindong Wang, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
Dr. Jindong Wang currently works at Microsoft Research Asia as a Senior Researcher. He obtained his Ph.D from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019 with the excellent PhD thesis award. His research interest includes machine learning, large language models, and AI for social science. He has published over 50 papers with 14000+ citations at leading conferences and journals such as ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, TPAMI, IJCV etc. His research is reported by Forbes, MIT Technology Review, and other international media. He was selected by Stanford University as one of the World’s Top 2% Scientists and one of the AI Most Influential Scholars by AMiner. He has several Google scholar highly cited papers, Huggingface featured papers, and paperdigest most influential papers. He serves as the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), guest editor for ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), area chair for NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACMMM, and ACML, senior program committee member of IJCAI and AAAI. He leads several impactful open-source projects, including transferlearning, PromptBench, torchSSL, USB, personalizedFL, and robustlearn, which received over 16K stars on Github. He published a book Introduction to Transfer Learning. He gave tutorials at IJCAI’22, WSDM’23, KDD’23, and AAAI’24.
Jitao Sang (opens in new tab), Professor, Beijing Jiaotong University
Jitao Sang, professor at Beijing Jiaotong University. His research interests include multimodal analysis, trustworthy AI and alignment, AI Agent.
Lichao Sun, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University
Dr. Lichao Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University and an Adjunct Professor at the Mayo Clinic. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Philip S. Yu, following his M.S. and B.S. degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Sun has authored over 100 publications in top-tier venues such as Nature Medicine, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, S&P, and KDD. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including 2024 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award, 2024 OpenAI Researcher Award, and NSF CRII Award.
Linus Huang (opens in new tab), Research Assistant Professor, Division of Humanities, HKUST
Linus Huang is a Research Assistant Professor at the Division of Humanities and Centre for AI Research, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a StarTrack Scholar at Microsoft Research Asia. His interdisciplinary research focuses on AI ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and embodied cognition. His work tackles issues of reducing algorithmic bias, aligning AI with human values, and understanding human intelligence. Currently, he leads the funded project Engineering Equity, which explores AI’s potential to mitigate implicit bias in HKUST.
Linyi Yang, Assistant Professor, Westlake University
Linyi Yang is currently working at Westlake University as a Research Assistant Professor. He graduated with a Ph.D. from University College Dublin in 2021, under the supervision of Professor Barry Smyth (the Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the fellow of European Coordinating Committee on AI). His research interests lie in LLMs, causal inference, and explainable artificial intelligence. He has been the only recipient of the Postdoc Representative at Westlake University in 2023, the only recipient of Outstanding Self-financed Chinese Students Abroad Scholarship (Category B) in Ireland awarded by the NSFC in 2022, and was a nominee for the Best Paper at CCIS in 2018. He has published over 40 articles in prestigious international conferences and journals, including 13 co-leading publications, with 9 in CCF-A and 4 in CCF-B venues, and received more than 3,000 citations.
Miran Lee, Outreach Director, MSR Accelerator Korea
Miran Lee is a Director of Microsoft Research Outreach Group at Microsoft Research responsible for academic collaboration in Korea and the Asia-Pacific region.
Lee 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, and Microsoft Azure for Research. 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).
Muhua Huang, Master student, Computational Social Science, University of Chicago
Muhua Huang is a master’s student in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, with a BA in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of British Columbia. She previously interned at MSRA Social Computing group. Her research spans human-centered AI, computational social science, and psychometrics. Currently, her work focuses on using LLM agents to simulate human personality, cognition, behavior, and social interactions.
Renhe Jiang (opens in new tab), Lecturer, Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo
Renhe Jiang is a lecturer at Center for Spatial Information Science, The University of Tokyo. He received his B.E. degree in Software Engineering from Dalian University of Technology in 2012, M.S. degree in Information Science from Nagoya University in 2015, and Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from The University of Tokyo in 2019. From 2019 to 2022, he was an assistant professor at Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo. His research interests include AI, spatiotemporal data mining, time series forecasting, human mobility modeling, and graph learning.
Rita Matulionyte (opens in new tab), Associate Professor, Law School, Macquarie University
Rita is an international expert in technology and intellectual property law, with a recent focus on legal regulation and governance of Artificial Intelligence technologies. She acquired her PhD degree from Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg/Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Germany, suma cum lauda) in 2010. Since then she researched and lectured in universities in Japan, Germany, Lithuania, and Australia. To date, she published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, as well as a monograph on Applicable Law to Copyright Infringement: A Comparison of ALI and CLIP Principles. Rita is regularly invited to present in conferences in Europe, South and North America, and Asia, and has prepared reports for the European Commission, European Patent Office, and the governments of Australia, South Korea and Lithuania.
Rita has led projects on ‘Government Use of Face Recognition Technologies: Legal Challenges and Solutions’ (Lithuanian Research Council grant) and ‘Towards Explainable AI in Healthare’ (Macquarie University Research Acceleration Scheme), and was an investigator at the NSW Ombudsman project ‘Mapping Automated Decision Making Tools in Administrative Decision Making in NSW’ (led by Prof Kimberlee Weatherall). Previously she was a recipient of a research grant by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science for her project on ‘The Law Applicable to Copyright’.
She is a Lead of the Emerging Technologies Workstream at the Australian Society for Computers and Law (AUSCL), a member of Australia Standards, Committee IT-043, a Lead of the Explainable AI research stream at the Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence at Macquarie University, an affiliate of ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making, a member of Macquarie University Agency and Ethics Research Centre and the Intellectual Property Association of Australia and New Zealand (IPSANZ).
Rita is willing to supervise student projects in the areas of technology and intellectual property law, especially in the area of AI and law.
Sangchul Park (opens in new tab), Associate Professor, School of Law, Seoul National University
Sangchul Park is an associate professor at Seoul National University School of Law. He completed his doctoral degree (JSD) at the University of Chicago and his undergraduate studies at Seoul National University. His main research area is the legal oversight of AI applications and the application of ML and NLP to legal studies. At the law school, he is teaching AI & law and information & telecommunications law. Prior to beginning his academic career, he spent more than 13 years in private practice specializing in technology, media, and telecommunications.
Stephan Sonnenberg (opens in new tab), Associate Professor, School of Law, Seoul National University
Stephan SONNENBERG is an Associate Professor at Seoul National University’s School of Law. Prior to teaching in Korea, Stephan has taught in Bhutan and at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools in the United States. His academic focus is on social entrepreneurship, human rights, conflict management, and international development studies. He studied Law at Harvard Law School and earned a degree in international affairs at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Tianguang Meng (opens in new tab), Professor, Department of Political Science, Tsinghua University
Tianguang Meng is a full professor in the Department of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences in Tsinghua University, the director of The Research Center on Data and Governance, and the executive director of Tsinghua Computational Social Science Institute. His research interest includes government responsiveness, politics of information and politics of Digital Governance in China. His articles have been published in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, World development, and Comparative Politics. He earned the B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Peking University. Previously, He was a visiting scholar in Harvard University and University of California, San Diego.
Xiaoyuan Yi, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia
Xiaoyuan Yi, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He obtained his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in computer science from Tsinghua University. He mainly engages in natural language generation (NLG) and Societal AI research, and published 30+ papers in top-tier AI conference such as ICLR, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP and AAAI. He has won honors such as the Tsinghua University Supreme Scholarship, the Xinhua Net The 10 Most Influential People on the Internet, the Best Paper Award and the Best System Demonstration Award of the Chinese Conference on Computational Linguistics, Rising Star Award of IJCAI Young Elite Symposium, Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award by China Computer Federation (CCF), Rising Stars in Social Computing by The Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) and so on.
Xing Xie, Partner Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia
Dr. Xing Xie is a partner research manager at Microsoft Research Asia. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Since joining Microsoft Research Asia in July 2001, Dr. Xie has focused on data mining, social computing, and responsible AI. His work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the IEEE MDM 2023 Test-of-Time Award, ACM SIGKDD 2022 Test-of-Time Award, ACM SIGKDD China 2021 Test-of-Time Award, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020 10-Year Impact Award Honorable Mention, and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019 10-Year Impact Award. He has delivered keynote speeches at notable conferences such as MDM 2019, ASONAM 2017, and W2GIS 2011. Dr. Xie serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems, ACM Transactions on Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, and CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction. He served as program co-chair of ACM Ubicomp 2011, PCC 2012, UIC 2015, SMP 2017, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2021, ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022, IEEE MDM 2022, PAKDD 2024, and IEEE BigData 2025. Dr. Xie is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and China Computer Federation.
Yong Lim (opens in new tab), Associate Professor, School of Law, Seoul National University
Yong Lim is an Associate Professor at Seoul National University (“SNU”), School of Law, where he also served as Associate Dean of Student Affairs until 2020. He is the co-founder and director of SNU AI Policy Initiative (“SAPI”). SAPI is one of the labs currently spearheading a project at SNU’s Center for Trustworthy AI to establish normative and technical standards for AI. His areas of specialty include competition law, consumer protection, privacy and data governance. Yong graduated from Seoul National University, College of Law, and obtained his S.J.D. at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining academia, Yong practiced law at Kim & Chang in Seoul, Korea. Yong was a Bok International Professor at Penn Carey Law in 2023.