On April 28, Dr. Liu Tieyan, associate dean of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, was appointed adjunct professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology（HUST）. The appointment ceremony was held online. Dr. Liu Tieyan was presented a letter of appointment by Feng Dan，dean of the School of Computer Science and Technology, HUST. Leaders of the School of Computer Science and Technology, including Wu Tao, Chair of the School Committee, Shi Xuanhua, the associate dean, and Liu Peng, the Deputy Chair of the School Committee were also present at the ceremony. Following the ceremony, Dr. Liu Tieyan was invited to the “TIME·Frontier” forum of the School of Computer Science and Technology, and the live broadcast of the forum attracted more than 400 participants.

During the appointment ceremony, Feng Dan said that the appointment of Dr. Liu Tieyan as an adjunct professor of HUST is conducive to deepening the cooperation between HUST and MSRA in discipline construction, scientific research, and talent training. Feng Dan hoped that the two sides could seek closer cooperation and contribute to constructing a first-class university and disciplines. Ma Xin, Director of Academic Cooperation at Microsoft Research Asia, expressed his expectation for the establishment of a long-term cooperation mechanism between the two sides in other areas in the future. Dr. Liu Tieyan expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to work at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, praising the solid educational foundation and comprehensive level of HUST.

After the appointment ceremony, Dr. Liu Tieyan gave an academic presentation titled "Unleash the industrial and Scientific Value of Artificial Intelligence". During the presentation, Liu focused on recent research achievements made by Microsoft Research Asia in the field of artificial intelligence.

He mentioned that the MSRA has explored a lot on the industrial application of artificial intelligence. For instance, FOST, an open-source tool for spatiotemporal prediction available throughout the industry that has a high level of universality and usability. It has provided successful artificial intelligence technology solutions for quantitative investment, COVID-19 pandemic trend prediction, and medical insurance risk prediction. In addition to the prediction function, Microsoft Research Asia also released MARO, a multi-agent resource optimization platform, to help industries efficiently optimize their resource allocation.

Dr. Liu also mentioned that Microsoft Research Asia has made influential scientific progress and has developed close ties with many universities and institutions at home and abroad. For example, LordNet for efficient PDE solution of fluid; Dual Learning-Based Artificial Intelligence Model in the environmental field to estimate pollutant emissions; Graformer, winner of several international molecular property prediction competitions; and the first proposal of novel coronavirus N-terminal Domain (NTD) which works as a “wedge” and plays a crucial regulatory role in the virus infection process.

After the presentation, teachers and students questioned Dr. Liu on the artificial intelligence application and engaged in a heated discussion.

Dr. Liu Tieyan is a distinguished scientist of Microsoft Research Asia and a fellow of IEEE and ACM, an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham, and an adjunct professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and Nankai University (NKU). Dr. Liu Tieyan is well-known for his pioneer work on “learning to rank”, and his outstanding academic achievements in the fields of web search and computational advertising. His recent research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning for industrial applications, and machine learning for physical science.

Source: School of Computer Science and Technology

Edited by: Luo Xin, Jiang Jing