Harry Shum Heung Yeung, Doctor of Engineering honoris causa


Harry Shum is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University and the founding chairman of the International Digital Economy Academy. In 1996, Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research 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 a research manager, assistant managing director, and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and a Distinguished Engineer. In 2017 and 2018, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom, respectively. Harry Shum was the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group. He was responsible for driving the company’s overall AI strategy and forward-looking research and development efforts spanning infrastructure, services, apps, and agents. He oversaw AI-focused product groups including Bing. He also led Microsoft Research, one of the world’s premier computer science research organizations, and its integration with the engineering teams across the company. 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.