About
Dr. Nicholas (Jing) Yuan currently serves as Technical Advisor to the Corporate Vice President (CVP) & Partner at Microsoft, focusing on strategy development, long-range planning, and technical/product innovations. He is also an Adjunct Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Nicholas has a proven track record in globally impactful AI research, AI product development, and AI commercialization, combined with extensive experience in leading technological innovation. Previously, he was Vice President of AI, Chief Scientist and Director of the Language & Speech Innovation Lab at Huawei Cloud, where he led a global team to drive the adoption and commercialization of AI and big data technologies across industries such as smart cities, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and energy. Before that, he served as Deputy General Manager of the AI Creation Business Team and as a Senior Applied Scientist Lead/Manager at Microsoft. During this time, he spearheaded the development of Microsoft’s Xiaoice AI-Generated Content technologies, including groundbreaking products like the “Image-Inspired Poetry” system and a suite of AIGC offerings. Earlier in his career, he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research. Nicholas holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics, both from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Over the years, Nicholas has published more than 100 papers in top-tier conferences and journals, including ACM SIGKDD, IEEE TKDE, ACM Ubicomp, ACL, ACM TOIS, WWW, ICDE, AAAI, and others. He has regularly served as a program committee member or chair for leading international conferences, as well as a reviewer for top journals in the fields of data mining and AI. His research has been featured multiple times by influential media outlets such as MIT Technology Review. In 2021, he was recognized as one of the Most Influential Scholars in the data mining domain by Aminer AI 2000, ranking No. 12 worldwide and Top 2 in China.
Nicholas has received numerous prestigious honors, including the Microsoft Fellowship (2011), the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2013), and the Best Student Paper Awards at ACM SIGKDD (2016, 2018) (as the supervisor of the first author). He also received the Best Paper Runner-up Award at ACM SIGSPATIAL (2010) and the Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013). In 2018, he was awarded the First-class Prize of the Natural Science Award by the Ministry of Education in China. Additionally, he earned the 10-Year Impact Honorable Mention at ACM SIGSPATIAL (2020), the Test-of-Time Award at ACM SIGKDD (2022), and the Test-of-Time Award at IEEE MDM (2023). Nicholas is a Fellow of the IEEE.
袁晶博士现任微软全球合伙人、全球资深副总裁技术顾问，专注于战略发展、长期技术规划以及技术与产品创新。他同时是香港科技大学的客座教授，在人工智能研究、产品开发和商业化领域拥有全球影响力，并积累了丰富的技术创新领导经验。此前，他曾担任华为云人工智能领域副总裁、语音语义实验室主任及首席科学家，带领全球团队推动人工智能和大数据技术在城市、医疗、工业、金融、能源等多个领域的应用与商业化落地。加入华为之前，他担任微软资深科学家主管，负责微软Bing亚太区知识图谱的构建与应用，并作为微软小冰人工智能创作（AI Creation）技术负责人及人工智能创造事业部副总经理，领导团队打造了包括“看图写诗”在内的AIGC产品线。在更早之前，他曾担任微软亚洲研究院研究员。他在中国科学技术大学获得数学学士学位和计算机科学博士学位，师从陈国良院士。
多年来，袁晶博士在ACM SIGKDD、IEEE TKDE、ACM Ubicomp、ACL、ACM TOIS、WWW、ICDE、AAAI等顶级会议和期刊上发表了100余篇论文，并多次荣获KDD、ICDM等顶级国际会议的最佳论文奖项，其研究成果也多次被《麻省理工科技评论》等权威媒体报道。他长期担任数据挖掘与人工智能领域重要国际会议的程序委员会委员/主席，及顶级期刊审稿人，并于2021年入选Aminer AI 2000数据挖掘领域最具影响力学者榜单（全球排名第12、中国大陆第2）。袁晶博士曾荣获多项重量级奖项，包括国家教育部自然科学一等奖（2018年）、中科院百篇优博论文奖（2013年）及微软学者奖（2011年）。此外，他分别于2020年、2022年和2023年荣获ACM SIGSPATIAL十年影响力论文荣誉奖、ACM SIGKDD时间检验奖及IEEE MDM时间检验奖。袁晶博士是国际电气与电子工程师学会会士（IEEE Fellow）。