Dr. Hong-Jiang Zhang is the Managing Director of Microsoft Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a R&D center working on advanced technologies and products in the areas of web service, mobile, unified communication, gaming, servers, developer tools and serviceability. He is also the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Microsoft China Research and Development Group (CRD), helping to chart Microsoft’s research and development agenda including identifying the needs of emerging markets, developing products and solutions for China, and developing China R&D operation into a key global research, innovation and product development base for Microsoft. Dr. Zhang was the Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, in charge of research and technology transfer in areas of Natural Language Computing, Media Computing, Data Mining and Web Search, and Distributed Systems. His leadership and outstanding achievement, marked by high impact in academia and Microsoft’s products, are critical in establishing Microsoft Research Asia into a world class basic research center in computer science. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Zhang was with Hewlett-Packard Labs at Palo Alto, CA, where he was a research manager, working on multimedia content retrieval and management technologies, and intelligent image and video processing. He also worked at the Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore, where he led several projects in video and image content analysis and retrieval, computer vision and multimedia information systems.
Over the years, Dr. Zhang’s work has had a significant impact on the development of Microsoft’s research and development capabilities, Microsoft products, the IT industry and the academic community. He has authored four books, over 350 scientific papers, and holds over 60 US patents. As an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, Dr. Zhang is well recognized for his leadership in media computing and his pioneering work in video and image content analysis, search and browsing. He is also the winner of the 2008 Asian American Engineer of the Year and Program Magazine’s 2007 China Software Men of the Year (Gold Ox Award). Dr. Zhang received a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Zhengzhou University, China, both in Electrical Engineering.
