User:Thatrobguy/Harry Shum

Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum (born in October 1966) is a computer scientist of Chinese origin. He is the Executive Vice President of the Artificial Intelligence and Research group at Microsoft. He is known for his research on computer vision and computer graphics, and for the development of the search engine Bing.

Early life and education
Shum grew up in Nanjing, China in a society that was in the midst of change in the 1960s. He got his bachelor's degree from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, and a master's degree from Hong Kong University. His father encouraged him to pursue studies in computer science, which motivated him to move to the US and get a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996.

Career
In 1996, Shum joined Microsoft Research in Redmond. He then moved to Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia) when it was founded in 1998. In 2004, he became the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia. In 2006, he was promoted to Distinguished Engineer of Microsoft Corporation. In 2007, he became Corporate Vice President of Bing Product Development at Microsoft. In 2013, he took on the responsibilities as Microsoft's Executive Vice President, Technology & Research including oversight of Microsoft Research. In 2016, he took lead of Microsoft's newly-formed Artificial Intelligence and Research group. Under Shum's leadership, the Artificial Intelligence and Research group at Microsoft combined advances in machine learning with delivering more intelligent services with the goal of democratizing artificial intelligence and bringing intelligent capabilities to systems that everyone uses.

Shum's team pursued innovation in language and dialogue, human computer interaction and computer vision that make it possible for enterprises to use, or experiment with, trained neural networks for AI tooling. Those innovations were used in Microsoft products such as Seeing AI, Presentation Translator for PowerPoint, and a new Bing Entity Search API. Shum expanded Microsoft's investment in AI by establishing an AI-focused venture fund, taking a stake in AI incubator Element AI and acquiring deep learning research pioneer Maluuba.

Research
Shum has published over 200 papers at international conferences and journals. Most of them are focused on computer graphics and computer vision. He is a pioneer and proponent of research on interactive computer vision. He has published many important interactive computer vision papers on ACM SIGGRAPH. He was also active in Image-based modeling and rendering, which is an important field in realistic computer graphics. In recent years, since he worked on Bing he has been active in web search and data mining research.

Shum was named IEEE Fellow by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2006. In 2007, he was recognized as ACM Fellow by Association for Computing Machinery. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the United States, for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics, and for leadership in industrial research and product development.