Prof. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Yao is a world-famous computer scientist recognized as an international pioneer in algorithm analysis, cryptography and quantum computation. He won the Turing Award in 2000, the most prestigious award in computer science there is, being the first ever, and so far the only Chinese scientist, to win the honor.

Born in Shanghai, Prof. Yao received a Doctor of Philosophy in physics at Harvard University in 1972, and then a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1975. He was a faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. In 2004, Prof. Yao left Princeton to become a full-time professor at Tsinghua University where, in 2005, he inaugurated the “Computer Science Pilot Class” (nicknamed “Yao Class”), critically acclaimed as the “Best Undergraduate Education in Computer Science in the World” by the community. Later in 2011, he established the Center for Quantum Information and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University, aiming to design and materialize quantum computers and advance innovative integration between information science and technologies and many other areas. In recent years, Prof. Yao has been active in carrying out innovative theories and practices in artificial intelligence and financial technologies. In 2018, he launched the Turing Artificial Intelligence Institute of Nanjing and the Interdisciplinary Information Core Technologies Institute of Xi’an, in hope of facilitating industry-university-research integration and materialization of research findings.

Prof. Yao has made significant achievements and outstanding contributions to research areas such as computer sciences, cryptography and quantum computation. Besides the Turing Award, he’s received a great many international awards and honours, including the George Polya Prize, the Donald E. Knuth Prize, and honorary doctoral degrees from many Universities.