Advisory Board (en) – AI Center of Research Excellence

Advisory Board

Current Appointment: Motorola Foundation Chair Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Research Expertise: A pioneer in speech recognition and artificial intelligence, his research encompasses decision theory, intelligent signal and information processing, Hidden Markov Models (HMM), human-computer interaction, automated video systems, and communication science.
Impact: Systems developed based on his methodologies were implemented by Bell Labs in the world’s first automated telephone voice service. His foundational research remains the core theoretical basis for contemporary speech recognition systems used in smartphones, voice assistants, and vehicular navigation.
Honors and Distinctions: Academician of Academia Sinica; Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE); Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI); IEEE Fellow; and Bell Labs Fellow. He is a recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the prestigious IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

Current Appointment: Richard Dicker Professor and Dean of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University.
Research Expertise: A preeminent scholar in computer vision, multimedia, and AI, with a focus on image and video understanding, information retrieval, and content analysis.
Academic Leadership: His research has yielded significant breakthroughs in deep learning for visual understanding, cross-modal learning, few-shot learning, and explainable AI (XAI).
Industry Influence: Beyond academia, he actively promotes the practical application of AI, serving as an advisor to Amazon and other leading global technology firms.
Honors: Academician of Academia Sinica and IEEE Fellow. He has received the ACM SIGMM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

Current Appointment: Wexler Chair in Information Technology, University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
Research Contributions: A seminal figure in data mining and AI, his work in graph and network mining and social network analysis has been pivotal to the development of modern machine learning.
Recent Developments: His recent research explores Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation systems, and the promotion of the “Broad Learning” framework to expand the depth and utility of AI in practical applications.
Honors: Recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, recognizing his transformative contributions to big data analytics.

Professional Standing: A global leader in AI, speech technology, and industrial applications.
Experience: Formerly the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft and Chairman of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), where he led R&D in core technologies including AI, natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction.
Technological Legacy: Co-inventor of the CMU SPHINX system, a pioneering commercial speech recognition technology adopted by industry giants such as Microsoft and Apple. He is considered a foundational architect of modern voice assistants.
Academic Influence: Co-author of Spoken Language Processing, which remains a definitive textbook in the field. He is an IEEE Fellow and a distinguished member of the Microsoft technical community.

Professional Standing: A preeminent leader in the global technology industry and a foundational scholar in Asian search engine technology. He is widely recognized as a primary architect of Taiwan’s digital ecosystem and a leading strategist for national AI advancement.
Experience: Dr. Chien was the inaugural employee of Google in Taiwan and served as its Managing Director for many years. Under his leadership, Google Taiwan evolved into the corporation’s largest research and development center in East Asia, specializing in the strategic integration of hardware and software. He currently serves as an independent director for prominent AI firms, including Appier and iKala.
Technological Legacy: He was instrumental in establishing the technological framework for Chinese-language search and information retrieval. His vision facilitated the large-scale implementation of global search technologies within the Asian market, bridging the gap between advanced research and commercial scalability.
Academic Influence: Formerly a Research Fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, and a joint professor at National Taiwan University. His research expertise encompasses Information Retrieval and Chinese Natural Language Processing. He remains a vital advisor to the government and a mentor to the technology startup community, profoundly shaping Taiwan’s future AI direction.

Professional Standing: A world-renowned authority in the fields of machine learning and mathematical optimization. He is a Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University and an elected Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAI, representing the highest level of international scholarly recognition.
Experience: Throughout his career, Professor Lin has focused on the intersection of theoretical optimization and the development of practical machine learning software. His extensive work in large-scale classification has led to numerous high-impact collaborations with premier international research institutions and industry leaders.
Technological Legacy: He is the primary creator and lead developer of LIBSVM, one of the most widely utilized and influential support vector machine (SVM) libraries globally. This software has become a standard tool in both academic research and industrial machine learning pipelines, a contribution recognized by the prestigious ACM Software System Award.
Academic Influence: His research on optimization algorithms for machine learning is among the most highly cited in the discipline. His scholarly excellence has been honored with the Humboldt Research Award from Germany and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Distinguished Research Award. His pedagogical contributions continue to define the training of machine learning researchers worldwide.