HKUST MOE/MSRA Information Technology Key Laboratory AI Workshop and HKUST Microsoft Student Club formally Established

On November 19, hosted by the director of HKUST MOE/MSRA Information Technology Key Laboratory, Prof. Lei Chen, two excellent researchers from Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Dr. Chin-Yew Lin and Dr. Tao Mei gave talks on the theme of "Are We Read for the Age of AI" to HKUST students and faculty. Two researchers shared their latest research progress in artificial intelligence including video understanding, deep learning, NLP, knowledge engineering and machine learning.

The Principal Researcher, Dr. Chin-Yew Lin, gave a talk titled "Solving Math Number Word Problem - What can NLP, Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning contribute?". In his talk, Dr. Lin With discussed the availability of personal agents such as Cortana, Siri and Google. Now, it seems a world of humans and machines communicate and solve problems together in natural language is not far away. The scene of freely chatting with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Samantha in Her could happen to us seems within reach. The question is are we ready to go there? He used solving math number word problem as an example to show how the emerging NLP, knowledge engineering and machine learning technologies can pay the way to this holy grail and what challenges that we have to address to travel down the path?

Prof. Lei Chen and Dr. Chin-Yew Lin

Dr. Chin-Yew Lin

The leader researcher, Dr. Tao Mei gave a talk titled "Video Understanding Meets Deep Learning". In his talk, he pointed out that the progress made in deep learning has advanced the research in video analysis. For humans, it is very easy to understand videos since we can easily capture the video even when we were just born and we can capture and recognize each dynamic figure in our view. However, it is very difficult for computers to recognize screen content and capture motions, which need tremendous computation to implement. When a computer recognizes some keywords from the video, due to the complexity of the semantics and sentence structure, also tenses and plural forms, it is much more difficult for a computer to organize single words into a semantic meaningful sentence. Dr. Tao demonstrated his latest research progress in deep learning for video content analysis. His multimedia research group has achieved the world's best experimental results and their algorithms are considered as the best for video understanding.

HKUST and MSRA have been collaborated for 15 years on promoting the cutting-edge research in IT. The joint Laboratory Director Professor Lei Chen said that their goal is not only to publish in top journals and conferences, but also to make the results of the research have a positive and long-term impact on the whole society.

On the same day, HKUST Microsoft Student Club was formally established. This is MSRA's first student club outside mainland China. Microsoft's Global vice President, Asia-Pacific R & D Group Chairman and Microsoft Research Asia Director, Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, gave a speech to encourage students to actively utilize the industry resources to participant and pursuit their dreams. Meanwhile, the students need to contribute their efforts to the whole society.

Establishment of HKUST Microsoft Student Club

Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon