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

I have been a reviewer for many conferences and journals including CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACM Multimedia, ICMR, AAAI, IJCV, TPAMI, TKDE, TMM, and etc. I occasionally serve as a panelist/reviewer for NSF.

Awards