My long term research interest is to build machines that perceive the world better than human. Recently my research focuses on learning from noisy labels and attention models. I am best known for my work on computer vision, although I am also working on speech & language.
I live in Amherst, MA with my wife and family, but I travel very often to NYC on a weekly basis.
I like building new things on computers. I learned to build AI-based products from my industry experience at Google, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft, and NEC Labs. I also co-founded a startup called HelloVera AI.
I am enthusiastic to be a teacher and help students. I taught at Columbia University from 2013 to 2018. Especially when startup life introduced too much pressure, teaching helped me to relax.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Advisor: Prof. Thomas S. Huang), M.Phil. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Advisor: Prof. Xiaoou Tang and Prof. Jianzhuang Liu), and Bachelor degree from University of Science and Technology of China.
I am a senior member of IEEE and ACM.
Community Service
- Associate editor, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation , 2019-now
- Associate editor, The Visual Computer, 2018-now
- Area chair, ACM Multimedia 2017
- Industrial chair, ICMR 2017
- Area chair, WACV 2017
- Co-orginizer, ACM Multimedia Yahoo-Flickr Grand Challenge on Tag and Caption Prediction, 2016
- Co-organizer, ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge "New York City 360", 2014-2015
- Area chair, WACV, 2014
- Guest editor, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2014
- Founding co-chair, ACM workshop on Geo-Multimedia, 2012-2014
- Guest editor, IEEE MultiMedia Magazine, 2014
- General co-chair, Greater New York Area Multimedia and Vision Meeting, 2012 - 2013.
- Area chair, ACM Multimedia, 2012
- Guest editor, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMMCCAP), 2013
Awards
- ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award, 2017
- First Place in Watson NLP TAO Challenge, 2014
- IBM Research Division Award, Dec 2013
- IBM Research Division Award, May 2013
- IBM Research Division Award, Nov 2012
- First Place in ImageCLEF Medical Image Classification, 2013
- IBM Outstanding Technical Accomplishment (for multimedia group), 2012
- Best Paper Award, the 1st International Workshop on Big Data Mining, 2012
- First Place in ImageCLEF Medical Image Classification, 2012
- First Place in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition, 2010
- Emerging Leader in Multimedia and Signal Processing from IBM Watson workshop, 2010
- Facebook Fellowship Finalist, 2010
- UIUC Computer Science and Engineering Fellow, 2009-2010
- Nomination for the Distinguished Master Thesis of the Faculty of Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005
- Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, University of Science and Technology of China, 2003
- First Class Mathematics Olympic, Liaoning Province, China, 1997