Keynote Speaker

Dr. Harry Shum

Title: Taking Search to New Frontiers

Abstract:

Today¹s search engines not only have become one of the most important services on the Web but are also driving the development of next-generation computing platform for the global Internet economy. In addition to connecting people to information at the speed of light with the use of automatic algorithms, search technologies are also revolutionizing many other aspects of people's lives, including shopping, commerce, entertainment, travel, health care, and social activities. In this talk, I will first introduce Microsoft¹s latest research and product development efforts toward building an infrastructure for web-scale data management and data analysis to better structure the Web. I will then talk about how we will take Web search further into these new frontiers and how our efforts will empower people to do things that were not possible before.

Biographical Information:

Dr. Harry Shum is the Corporate Vice President responsible for search product development at Microsoft. Previously, he oversaw the research activities at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and the lab's collaborations with universities in Asia Pacific, and was responsible for Internet Services Research Center (ISRC), an applied research organization dedicated to the long-term and short-term technology investments in search and advertising at Microsoft.

Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 where he worked in Redmond, WA as a researcher. He then moved to Beijing as one of the founding members to start Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). His nine-year tenure there began as a research manager and subsequently moved up to Assistant Managing Director, Managing Director of MSRA, Distinguished Engineer, and Corporate Vice President.

Shum is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow for his contributions on computer vision and computer graphics. Dr. Shum has published more than 100 papers in computer vision, computer graphics, pattern recognition, statistical learning, and robotics. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents.

Shum received a doctorate in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. In his spare time, he enjoys playing basketball, rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and spending quality time with his family.