Microsoft’s Yong Rui wins IEEE 2016 Technical Achievement Award

Microsoft’s assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, Yong Rui, has just won an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Computer Society 2016 Technical Achievement Award for his contributions to multimedia analysis and retrieval.

Rui was one of the earliest researchers to explore relevance feedback in image-based search, which essentially is about customizing search results based on a user’s previous searches. The managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, said of Rui’s win, “As a brilliant scientist, Yong’s research results in multimedia have inspired a lot of researchers in the academic community,” and that the award was “a true testament to Yong’s research and development achievements in the fields of multimedia analysis and retrieval over the years.”

Recent projects Rui has worked on for Microsoft include a framework that can describe the contents of a video clip, the chatbot XiaoIce, and Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana.

When reflecting on his 17 plus years with Microsoft, Rui said, “a huge, huge benefit of working for Microsoft” was the chance to work on such a variety of projects from conducting fundamental scientific research to shipping products to millions of people.

In December 2015, Microsoft research manager, Li Deng, also received an IEEE Technical Achievement Award for his work in language processing, deep learning, and voice recognition.