Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program 2009

PhD Candidate: Derek Hao HU

The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program has been highly successful in fostering advances and collaboration in computer science and research. Program aims to recognize outstanding junior PhD students in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as facilitate and empower the future growth of junior PhD students majoring in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Information Science, or Applied Mathematics, who have the potential to become future research leaders.

The program began in 1999, and since then it attracted around 500 PhD candidates from 48 universities in the Asia-Pacific region. From its inception to 2008, more than two hundred and fifty outstanding PhD students have been awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship honors or scholarship.

This year, 25 out of 98 nominated PhD candidates from various universities/institutions in Asia have been awarded fellowships. We are very pleased that our PhD student, Mr. Derek Hao HU is among those selected. He will be provided a cash award of US$6,000 to support his research and academic endeavors and may have an opportunity to be an intern at MSRA.

Derek is a PhD student of the Computer Science and Engineering Department under the supervision of Prof. Qiang YANG. He got his Bachelor's degree in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University in 2007. His research interests include Machine Learning, Web Mining, Automated Planning and Bioinformatics etc.

"I'm really honored to receive the Fellowship this year. I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Qiang Yang, for his guidance which led me into this exciting research field. I also would like to thank all of our group members, and our department head Prof. Mounir Hamdi for his help during my application. Such an award encourages me to continue my research on both the area of activity recognition and query intention mining. I would try my best to do more high quality research work and have more collaborations with Microsoft Research Asia and other researchers in this field." Derek remarked.