Industry Panel

Time

11:15-12:30, Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Room

Auditorium 3F

Abstract:

The ultimate goal of innovations in any field of engineering is to make an impact in practice. The path from brilliant research ideas to their practical applications, however, is almost never straightforward. At times, the barriers to adoption of novel technologies may even originate from non-technical sources. At ICME 2019, we gather a panel of distinguished panelists to share their personal journeys and perspectives in navigating the landscape of applied research. Our panelists draw from their own distinguished careers to discuss how to best foster innovation in industry, for instance, how to select research topics with both practical relevance and intellectual merit. They will also discuss and debate about potential pitfalls to avoid along the journey of innovation.

Moderator: Gao Xinxin Vanessa, CEO, Jiangmen

Gao Xinxin Vanessa is the co-founder and CEO of Jiangmen. Jiangmen is a venture capital firm focuses on early stage tech companies' investment, with an innovative model. Jiangmen Runs high-quality AI Chinese researchers, scientists and tech experts' tech community in China. Jiangmen also partner with over 50+ global Fortunes 500 companies and China leading companies in Retail, Logistic, Finance, Healthcare, Automobile and more, to connect technology application into business scenarios. Before founding Jiangmen, Gao Xinxin Vanessa was the CEO of Microsoft Ventures China. Before that she worked for Microsoft Research and Microsoft China. Gao Xinxin Vanessa received her master degree from INSEAD, and from Tsinghua University.

Panelists:

Nozha Boujemaa(Chief Science and Innovation Officer, MEDIAN Technologies, France)

Nozha Boujemaa is a Key Opinion Leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence and data sciences. She is a Director of Research at Inria (the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics). She was the scientific Head of the IMEDIA/Inria Research Group (Large Scale Multimedia Content Search) for 10 years before becoming Director of the Inria Saclay Research Center from 2010 to 2015 and Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of Inria in Data Sciences. In 2017, Nozha Boujemaa founded the DATAIA Institute, an interdisciplinary Institute on Data Sciences, Artificial Intelligence & Society, which she will run until the end of 2018. As an expert in Interactive Visual Content Indexing and Retrieval and in unsupervised & semi-supervised learning, Nozha Boujemaa has contributed to the emergence of next-generation large-scale multimedia search engines. She managed several flagship collaborative projects with French and European industrials, is the co-author of over 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences and has supervised over 25 PhD and master students.

Nozha Boujemaa is Knight of the National Order of Merit and Member of the Board of Directors of Big Data Value Association (BDVA), Vice-Chair of the Artificial Intelligence High Level Expert Group (AI HLEG) of the European Commission and member of the AI Group of Experts of the OECD (AIGO). Nozha is also International Advisor for Japan Science and Technology Agency Program “Advanced Core Technologies for Big Data Integration” and Senior Scientific Advisor for “The AI Initiative“ (Harvard Kennedy School). She is President of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Technological Research “SystemX” until the end of 2018.

Xian-Sheng Hua (Head of AI Center/Distinguished Engineer, DAMO Academy/Alibaba Cloud, China)

Xiansheng Hua is now a Distinguished Engineer/VP of Alibaba DAMO Academy. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Peking University in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2001, as a Researcher. He was a Principal Research and a Development Lead in multimedia search with the Microsoft Search Engine in USA, from 2011 to 2013. He was a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research Redmond from 2013 to 2015. He became a Researcher and the Senior Director of the Alibaba Group in 2015, where he is also leading the Visual Computing Team, Search Division, Alibaba Cloud, and then DAMO Academy. He is currently a Distinguished Engineer/Vice President of the Alibaba Group, where he is leading a team working on large-scale visual intelligence on the cloud. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 research papers and has filed more than 90 patents. His research interests include big multimedia data search, advertising, understanding, and mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was one of the recipients of the 2008 MIT Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award for his outstanding contributions on video search. He was also a recipient of the Best Paper Awards at ACM Multimedia 2007, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology in 2014. He served as a Program Co-Chair for IEEE ICME 2012, ACM Multimedia 2012, and IEEE ICME 2013. He will be serving as a General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia in 2020.

Wenjun Zeng (Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia, China)

Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng is a Principal Research Manager and a member of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) at Microsoft Research Asia. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has been leading the video analytics research powering the Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Media Analytics Services, Microsoft Office, and Windows Machine Learning (ML) since 2014. He was with Univ. of Missouri from 2003 to 2016, most recently as a Full Professor. Prior to that, he had worked for PacketVideo Corp., Sharp Labs of America, Bell Labs, and Panasonic Technology. He received his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua Univ., the Univ. of Notre Dame, and Princeton Univ., respectively.

He is on the Editorial Board of International Journal of Computer Vision. He was an Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia Magazine, an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics & Security, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (TMM), and was on the Steering Committee of IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing and IEEE TMM. He was a Special Issue Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, TMM, ACM TOMCCAP, TCSVT, and IEEE Communications Magazine. He served as the Steering Committee Chair of IEEE ICME in 2010 and 2011, and has served as the General Chair or TPC Chair of several IEEE conferences (e.g., ICME2018, ICIP2017). He was the recipient of several best paper awards.

Marta Mrak (Lead Research Engineer at BBC, UK)

Marta Mrak is a Lead R&D Engineer at BBC R&D working on video compression, new content experiences and data analytics. She is also an Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Multimedia and Vision Research Group.

Within IEEE, Marta is active in numerous activities, e.g. she serves as General Co-Chair of IEEE ICME 2020, Lead TPC Co-Chair for IEEE ICME 2019 and Vice Chair of Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing.

Qibin Sun, Ph.D., IEEE Fellow (Professor at University of Science and Technology and Founder of Xietong Info-Tech Pte. Ltd.)

Dr. Qibin Sun is currently a Professor at University of Science and Technology of China and the Founder of Xietong Info-Tech Pte. Ltd. He was the Senior Manager in HP, and later a Distinguished Engineer in Cisco. Qibin owns full-stack experiences from research, productization, to commercialization.

Zhang Lei, Artificial Intelligence Scientist at Kuaishou

Zhang Lei received his Ph.D. degree (CS) from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. Lei’s research primarily focuses on large-scale multimedia retrieval. He has published 11 IEEE journal and conference papers in the field of computer vision and multimedia before his graduation. He is the lead author among 7 of the 11 published papers which have been widely cited and used.

After graduation, Zhang Lei joined HUAWEI 2012 lab, Media Technology Institute, and worked on developing the mobile phone camera algorithm. He participated in the research and development of core camera algorithms of several Huawei's flagship mobile phones, including the first dual-camera flagship P9, Mate 9 hybrid zoom, and P20 night scene shooting. His research specialization includes mobile phone camera algorithms, image processing and deep learning.

Zhang Lei joined Kuaishou in 2018, and is currently engaged in researching object retrieval algorithms. He is also responsible for building the Hangzhou AI team in the Multimedia Understanding Department.