On September 3, 2022, the latest winners of "WAIC··Yunfan Award" were announced on the AI Developer Forum of World Artificial Intelligence Conference, with a total of 11 "Bright Stars" and 15 "Rising Stars", showing the style of a new generation of young AI technology pioneers.

The 2022 WAIC·Yunfan Award received more than 100 valid applications and recommendations from all over the world, of which 26 were awarded, including young teachers and postdoctoral researchers from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Princeton, CMU, ETHZ and other universities at home and abroad, as well as young doers who have participated in the founding of new generation AI startups such as Luchen Technology and Taichi Graphics, covering the fields of theory and applications of machine learning, natural language processing, fundamental models, MLSys, photonic computing, etc.

The winners have thanked their teams, mentors and collaborators, saying that the award represents more the power of teamwork. And they appeal researchers and developers to keep learning and improve themselves, so that they can lead the paradigm shift in research, establish high-level AI ecology and platforms and lead industrial upgrading and intelligentized reconstruction in industry; Also, with the best policies, environment and talents to promote the development of AI technology in our country, they expect more Chinese scholars to devote themselves to the AI field and make more original, practical and essential contributions. And they wish AI development in China better and better.

Yang Yaodong, a representative of winners, also assistant professor at Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University and researcher of Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, said in his speech that with the wave of artificial intelligence sweeping the world, the community of AI developer has embarked on a new journey to promote the advancement and dissemination of science and technology, and that China's AI developer community has become a shining new force on the world stage.

「As researchers on the front line of AI research, it is our mission and responsibility to think about how to apply more general AI technologies to a wider and more diverse range of real-life production scenarios, so that they can become a real engine for social and economic development. 」

WAIC·Yunfan Award 2022 "Bright Stars" Introduction 

Feng Xiaocheng, Associate Professor at Harbin Institute of Technology

Feng Xiaocheng is an Associate Professor of the Computer Science Department at Harbin Institute of Technology and Associate Researcher of Pengcheng Laboratory. His research interests include natural language processing, text generation and so on. He has published more than 30 high- level papers, with more than 2200 Google citations. He is the area chair/member of the program committees of ACL, EMNLP, NAACL and other international conferences. He was selected into the 6th Young Elite Scientist Sponsorship Program by the China Association for Science and Technology and was awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China and the Second Prize of Science and Technology Progress Award of Heilongjiang Province.

Hu Yuanming, Co-Founder and CEO of Taichi Graphics

Hu Yuanming is the co-founder and CEO of Taichi Graphics as well as founder and lead developer of Taichi programming language. He graduated from Tsinghua University (Yao Class) with a bachelor’s degree and received his PhD in Computer Science from MIT. His research interests include computer graphics, physical simulation, programming languages and compliers, as well as artificial intelligence. He has published more than ten papers in top conferences such as SIGGRAPH, ICLR and CVPR. He received Edwin Webster/Snap/Adobe/Facebook scholarship during his PhD. He also won NOI/APIO/ACM-ICPC Regional Gold Medals and was selected into the Forbes China 30U30 list in 2021.

Liu Ziwei, Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University

Prof. Liu Ziwei is a Nanyang Assistant Professor at School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) in Nanyang Technological University. He received his bachelor’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and PhD from Multimedia Laboratory, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics. He has served as the area chair of some international conferences such as ICCV, NeurIPS, and AAAI. He has received the Microsoft Young Researcher Award, Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, ICCV Young Researcher Award, HKSTP Best Paper Award and Nanyang Assistant Professorship.

Meng Huaiyu, CTO of Lightelligence

Dr. Meng Huaiyu is co-Founder and CTO of Lightelligence. He received his PhD degree in Electric Engineering from MIT, where his research focused on integrated photonics in CMOS platform for Artificial Intelligence, telecom, datacom, and bio-sensing applications. He has published more than 10 papers in top journals and has applied for more than 100 patents worldwide, with nearly 20 granted. Currently, Dr. Meng Huaiyu is in charge of the technical route and product design of Lightelligence and leads the technical teams in various fields to complete the whole process of product development.

Wang Mengdi, Associate Professor at Princeton University

Wang Mengdi is a tenured professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning at Princeton University, where she conducts research in decision intelligence, reinforcement learning, and AI science. After graduating from Tsinghua University with a B.S. in Automation, Wang Mengdi went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study under Dimitri Bertsekas, a member of National Academy of Engineering, and received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics from MIT in 2013. In the same year, she joined Princeton University and became an assistant professor and doctoral advisor at the age of 24. In 2019, she became the youngest tenured professor at Princeton University. In the same year, she visited Google Brain during her sabbatical and served as a senior visiting scientist at DeepMind. From September to December 2020, she visited Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in the United States and participated in the formation of a research committee on reinforcement learning theory. She has received the NSF Career Award, the Google Faculty Award, the MIT Tech Review 35-Under-35 Innovation Award (China region), the Princeton SEAS Innovation Award and the Young Researcher Prize in Continuous Optimization of the Mathematical Optimization Society. She is the chair of ICLR, area chair of NeurIPS and ICML and area editor of Operations Research and Journal of Machine Learning Research.

Yang Jie, ZJU 100 Young Professor

Dr. Yang Jie is an assistant professor (ZJU 100 Young Professor) at Zhejiang University, School of Public Health, and an adjunct professor of the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University. He has conducted research and study at Harvard Medical School, Oxford University and Singapore University of Technology and Design. His research interests include the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, clinical big data analysis, natural language processing and other interdisciplinary areas. He has published 30 papers in top conferences and journals such as ACL, JAMA Network Open and so on. He won the COLING Best Paper Award, ACL Best demo Paper Award Nomination and the ISTD Best Dissertation Award. He has served as the area chair of several top AI and medical informatics conferences such as EMNLP, COLING and AMIA.

Yang Yaodong, Assistant Professor at Peking University

Researcher at Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence

Yang Yaodong is an assistant professor at Institute for AI, Peking University and a researcher at Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence. Before joining Peking University, he was an assistant professor at King's College London. He studies reinforcement learning, game theory and multi-agent systems, aiming to achieve artificial general collective intelligence through multi-agent reinforcement learning. He has maintained a track record of more than fifty publications at top conferences and journals. He received the Best System Paper Award at CoRL 2020 and the Best Blue-Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2021. He was nominated by UCL for Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award and won the Best Technology Breakthrough Award and Future Star Award of Huawei UK. He was also awarded the CCF-Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Young Faculty Open Research Fund 2022.

You Jiaxuan, Founding member of Kumo.AI

You Jiaxuan is 25 years old now. He received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. He is currently a founding member of Kumo AI, a graph learning startup and aspires to continue exploring the boundaries of technology in academia in the future. He has published more than 10 papers in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR and other top AI conferences, with more than 4000 citations. His open-source software has gained nearly 20000 Stars on Github. Besides that, he led the development of GraphGym and PyG, which are widely used in the field of graph learning. He has received the AAAI Best Student Paper Award, Baidu Scholarship as well as the JPMorgan Scholarship.

You Yang, Presidential Young Professor at NUS

Founder of Luchen Tech

You Yang is a presidential young professor at the National University of Singapore and a doctor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has set world records for ImageNet and BERT training speed. His algorithms have been used by Google, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and other giants. His first-author papers have won the Best Paper Award of IPDPS (0.8%, plenary presentation) and ICPP (0.3%, plenary presentation). He has been awarded: the Outstanding Graduate of Tsinghua University, the Outstanding Graduate of Beijing, National Scholarship of China, Siebel Scholarship, which has the highest amount of scholarship at Tsinghua University, ACM-IEEE HPC Fellowship, Lotfi A. Zadeh Prize, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Nomination by UC Berkeley (2 out of 81 Berkeley EECS PhD students graduated in 2020), Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list and IEEE-CS Early Career Researcher Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.

Zhang Ce, Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich

Zhang Ce is an assistant professor in Computer Science at ETH Zurich. The mission of his research is to make machine learning techniques widely accessible-​​-​-while being cost-​efficient and trustworthy-​​-​-to everyone who wants to use them to make our world a better place. He believes in a system approach to enabling this goal, and his current research focuses on building next-​generation machine learning platforms and systems that are data-​centric, human-​centric, and declaratively scalable. Before joining ETH, Ce finished his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-​​Madison and spent another year as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. His work has received recognitions such as the SIGMOD Best Paper Award, SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, Google Focused Research Award, an ERC Starting Grant, and has been featured and reported by Science, Nature, the Communications of the ACM, Atlantic and other media outlets.

Zhang Xiangyu, Principal Researcher at MEGVII Technology

Zhang Xiangyu is a Principal Researcher of MEGVII Technology and the leader of Foundation Model group. He got his PhD degree in Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2017, during which he participated in the Joint PhD Program of Microsoft Research Asia under the supervision of Dr. Sun Jian and Dr. He Kaiming. His research interests include deep convolutional neural networks design, deep learning model compression and acceleration, etc. He has published more than 50 papers in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, TPAMI and other top conferences and journals, received CVPR 2016 best paper award and won several top vision competitions such as ImageNet/ COCOCO. His works include the widely used neural network architecture ResNets/ ShuffleNets/ RepVGG series, neural architecture search algorithm SPOS, model compression and pruning algorithm CP/ MetaPruning, etc. He has more than 170,000 Google Scholar citations. He is listed in Forbes China U30 and AI 2000 List of the Most Influential Scholars in computer vision and awarded ELSEVIER China Highly Cited Scholar as well as Zhiyuan Young Scientist.

WAIC·Yunfan Award 2022 “Rising Stars” Introduction

Bai Lei, Research Scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory

Bai Lei is currently working at Shanghai AI Laboratory. He received his PhD degree from the University of New South Wales in 2021, and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney. He is mainly engaged in spatio-temporal machine learning, self-supervised learning and its applications in interdisciplinary fields such as intelligent transportation and meteorology. He was awarded the Google PhD Fellowship, Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses, UNSW Engineering Excellence Award. He has published 33 academic papers in top AI journals and conferences such as TPAMI, NeurIPS, IJCAI, CVPR, and has been a reviewer or program committee member of mainstream journals and conferences.

Chen Chong, Senior Researcher at Huawei Inc.

Chen Chong is currently a senior researcher at Huawei Inc. Before he joined Huawei, he obtained his B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University. His supervisor is Prof. Zhang Min. His research interests are data mining, information retrieval, and pre-trained language models. He has published more than 10 papers as first author in top international conferences and journals, such as WWW, SIGIR, AAAI and TOIS. He has more than 700 Google citations for his first-author papers. He has been reviewer for SIGIR, WWW, AAAI, NeurIPS, TKDE, TOIS and other conferences and journals. He was awarded Zhong Shimo Scholarship at Tsinghua University, Jiang Nanxiang Scholarship, Tsinghua Special Scholarship Nomination, ByteDance Scholars Program (10 students in China), Baidu Scholarship (10 students in the world). He was included in the list of Global Top Chinese Young Scholars in Artificial Intelligence.

Dai Guohao, Postdoctoral Researcher at Tsinghua University

He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tsinghua University. His research mainly focuses on fast and energy-efficient circuits, systems and architectures for sparse computing. He has published more than 30 high-level international conference and journal papers. Dr. Guohao Dai has won honors like the champion of NeurIPS 2021 Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor (BIGANN) Search Challenge, ASP-DAC 2019 Best Paper Award, DAC 2022 Best Paper Candidate, DATE 2018 Best Paper Candidate, Outstanding Ph.D. Graduates of Beijing, Outstanding Ph.D. Graduates of Tsinghua University, Excellent Ph.D. Dissertation Award of Tsinghua University, etc. Guohao has also helped to guide his students to win honors including the third place in the ACM Student Research Competition, the first place in the MICRO Student Research Competition, etc. Dr. Dai Guohao has served as the PI of many projects such as the NSFC Youth Science Fund.

Ding Mingyu, PhD student at Hongkong University and visiting scholar at MIT

Ding Mingyu is a third year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof. Luo Ping. He is currently a visiting scholar in Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum's group at MIT. He received his B.S from Renmin University of China. His research mainly focuses on the application of computer vision and machine learning to autonomous driving and embodied intelligence. His goal is that intelligent agents can perceive, interact with, reason about and understand 3D physical world. He has published more than 20 papers in top conferences and journals and has received awards such as Baidu Fellowship and Microsoft Fellowship Nomination Award.

Hui Binyuan, Research Engineer at Alibaba DAMO Academy

Hui Yuanbin is a research engineer at Alibaba DAMO Academy. He went to college at the age of 15. His research interests include smart conversation and large-scale pre-trained model. He has published many papers in ACL, KDD, AAAI and other top conferences and achieved the first place in five authoritative lists. His work has been reported by many media. The AliCloud intelligent customer service products he participated in developing have been widely used by enterprises or organizations such as China Mobile, China Life, and the government 12345 hotline. In the China AI Cloud Services Market Research Report released by IDC, AliCloud Intelligent Customer Service has been ranked No. 1 in China's conversational AI cloud services market since 2019.

Liu Shu, Co-Founder & Technical Head at SmartMore Corporation Limited

Liu Shu is a doctor and senior engineer. He is a high-level talent of Shenzhen Peacock Program and an expert at The National High-tech Industry Innovation Center of Shenzhen. He graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof. Jia Jiaya and is currently the co-founder and technical head of SmartMore Corporation Limited. He has published nearly 40 papers in top conferences with more than 5800 citations and was awarded the Outstanding Reviewer of ICCV. He has led his team to be the winner of COCO 2017, a prestigious international academic competition on instance segmentation. He has been included in the 2020 and 2021 Hurun Under 30 list and the 2021 Forbes China 30 Under 30 list.

Liu Xihui, Assistant Professor at Hongkong University

Dr. Liu Xihui is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and Institute of Data Science (IDS), The University of Hong Kong. She received her bachelor's degree in Tsinghua University and her PhD degree from Multimedia Lab (MMLab), the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, she was a postdoc scholar at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Trevor Darrell. Her research interests cover computer vision and artificial intelligence. She has published more than 10 papers in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS and other conferences. She was awarded CVPR Outstanding Reviewer, ICLR Outstanding Reviewer, Adobe Research Fellowship 2022 and MIT EECS Rising Star 2021.

Liu Zhuang, Research Scientist at FAIR

Liu Zhuang received his PhD from UC Berkeley and is now a Research Scientist at FAIR, Meta AI. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yao Class at Tsinghua University. He has published many papers in top conferences and journals in the field of computer vision and machine learning, and has published several representative works in neural network model architecture covering DenseNet, ConvNeXt, Network Slimming, etc. He has worked as a visiting researcher or an intern at Intel Labs, Adobe Research, FAIR and Cornell University. He has been awarded CVPR Best Paper Award, NeurIPS Workshop Best Paper Award, Snap Research Fellowship, etc.

Ma Zhiheng, Assistant Professor at Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Co-Founder and CTO of Shenzhen Heils Union Technology Co. Ltd.

Ma Zhiheng graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University with a PhD and is now working at Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 10 academic papers as the main author in high-level international journals and conferences, including CVPR, ICCV and AAAI. He is a co-founder of Shenzhen Heils Union Tech Co. Ltd, which has got a fund of 70 million RMB in total. In 2021, he was awarded “Innovation China” Young Entrepreneur by China Association for Science and Technology and honored Level C Talent of Pengcheng Peacock Plan in 2022.

Miao Xupeng, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University

Miao Xupeng is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow working at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, he received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Peking University, supervised by Prof. Cui Bin. He is broadly interested in machine learning systems, data management and distributed computing. He has published more than 20 papers in top international conferences and journals such as SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD, ICDE, TKDE, etc. He received the VLDB Best Paper Award in 2022. He led the development of Hetu, a distributed deep learning system, which was selected as one of the top 10 open-source events in China by Synced in 2021.  

Shou Zheng, Assistant Professor at NUS

Shou Zheng is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, where he founded Show Lab. He was nominated for CVPR'22 Best Paper Finalist, CVPR'17 Best Student Paper, and won the first place in several international competitions. He has served as the area chair of leading academic conferences such as CVPR, ECCV, and ACM Multimedia. He was elected as a Fellow of the National Research Foundation of Singapore and was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List.

Wu Di, Founder and CEO of Deemos Technologies Inc.

Wu Di is the founder and CEO of Deemos Technologies Inc. He was among the second batch of graduates from ShanghaiTech University and the student leader at Mars Lab. During his time in the lab, he has dedicated himself to the study of high-fidelity light field avatar reconstruction and AI super-realistic 3D character creation. The Lab later developed the only "dome light field" micron-level digital facial scanning system in the world independently. He also has several granted patents. With underlying core technology of digital people and metaverse identity system, he founded Deemos Technologies Inc., trying to put the advanced technology in this field into use.

Xu Jingjing, Research Scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory

Xu Jingjing is a research scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory. Her research interests include natural language processing and multilingual machine translation. Before that, she has been working as a research scientist in ByteDance. She obtained her PhD degree from Institute of Computational Linguistics at School of Computer Science, Peking University. She has published more than 30 papers in top AI conferences and has got more than 1200 Google citations. She received the ACL 2021 Best Paper Award and AAAI 2021 New Faculty Highlights Award and has served as a reviewer of various journals and conferences.

Yang Jiancheng, Postdoc at EPFL and Co-Founder of Diannei Technology

Yang Jiancheng is a postdoc at EPFL and co-founder of Diannei Technology. He did his PhD (with distinction) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include medical AI and 3D computer vision. He has published more than 40 research papers as first author in top conferences and journals, including Cancer Research, CVPR, MICCAI, NeurIPS, etc. He co-founded Diannei Technology in 2017, mainly in charge of the innovation and commercialization of medical AI research. The products developed by Diannei Technology have served 157 medical institutions and three of them has obtained registration certificate for medical device. The company owns 11 patents for invention, one of which won the silver medal in the Shanghai Excellent Invention Selection Competition.

Zhang Wentao, Postdoc Research Fellow at Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila).

Zhang Wentao received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Peking University and is currently a postdoc research fellow at Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). His research focuses on large-scale graph machine learning. He has published more than 10 first author papers in the top Machine Learning (ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR), Data Mining (KDD, WWW) and Database (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE) conferences. He has worked as an intern both in Tencent and Apple. Besides, he is the contributor or designer of several system projects, including large-scale graph learning system SGL and distributed machine learning system Angel. His research works have been powering several billion-scale applications in Tencent, and some of them have been recognized by multiple prestigious awards, including Apple PhD Fellowship, the Best Student Paper Award at WWW’22, and the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award of Peking University.

About WAIC Yunfan Award

As the first award set up for recognizing young developers working in AI-related fields in the world, WAIC Yunfan Award is initiated by the organizing committee of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2020, and operated by Shanghai AI Laboratory, Synced, GAIAA, and AI Young Scientists Alliance.

After a rigorous selection, evaluation and review process, more than 60 young technical talents in the field of AI hardware and software have been selected, whose research results, open-source projects or industrial practices have made positive contributions to the development of AI, especially the construction of the AI developer ecosystem in China.

WAIC Yunfan Award begins in April every year and the winners will be announced on the WAIC Developer Forum that year. This award aims to promote the construction of talent exchange platform and community, thus facilitating the academic and industrial development of AI in China.