The Cheriton School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series presents:
Harry Shum, executive vice-president, Technology and Research, Microsoft
Image understanding: A practical perspective from Bing
Abstract: Since the launch of Bing in June 2009, we have seen Bing web search market share in the U.S. more than doubled and Bing image search query share more than quadrupled. In this talk, I will share and discuss the challenges and opportunities in image understanding based on our experience building Bing image search. Specifically, I will talk about how we have significantly improved image search quality, and built differentiated image search user experience using NLP, entity, big data, machine learning and computer vision technologies. By leveraging big data from billions of search queries, billions of images on the web and from the social networks, and billions of user clicks, we have designed massive machine learning systems to continuously improve image search quality. With the focus on natural language and entity understanding, for instance, we have improved Bing’s ability to understand the user intent beyond queries and keywords. I will demonstrate with many examples how Bing has delivered a superior image search user experience, quantitatively, qualitatively and aesthetically, by utilizing computer vision techniques.
Biography: Harry Shum is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Technology and Research group. He is responsible for driving the company’s overall technical directions, including mid-term and long-term technology strategy and forward-looking research and development efforts. He oversees Microsoft Research, one of the world’s premier computer science research organizations and its integration with the engineering teams across the company.
Previously, Dr. Shum served as the corporate vice president responsible for Bing search product development from 2007 to 2013. Prior to his engineering leadership role at Bing and online services, he oversaw the research activities at Microsoft Research Asia and the lab’s collaborations with universities in the Asia Pacific region, and was responsible for the Internet Services Research Center, an applied research organization dedicated to advanced technology investment in search and advertising at Microsoft.
Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 as a researcher based in Redmond, Washington. In 1998 he moved to Beijing as one of the founding members of Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). There he began a nine-year tenure as a researcher, subsequently moving on to become research manager, assistant managing director, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and a distinguished engineer.
Dr. Shum is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellow and an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellow for his contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. He received his PhD in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.