Paul Hsu

Paul is currently a principle software engineer at SwiftKey, focusing on Chinese keyboard, including language modeling, compact data structures, scalable decoding, and UI interactions. He first joined Microsoft speech recognition group in 2000 after graduating from Harvard University. After obtaining a PhD from MIT in speech recognition and natural language processing, he returned to join Microsoft Research as a researcher in 2009. There, he developed the core component for various auto-completion systems at Microsoft, including Bing, maps, Cortana, and Chinese cloud IME.

Cha Zhang

Dr. Cha Zhang is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft AI & Research. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1998 and 2000, respectively, both in Electronic Engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, in 2004. His main research area is multimedia signal processing, computer vision and machine learning. He has published over 80 technical papers and held 30+ US patents. He won the best paper award at ICME 2007 and the best student paper award at ICME 2010. He was the Program Co-Chair for VCIP 2012, and the General Co-Chair for ICME 2016. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia.

Katsu Ikeuchi

Katsushi Ikeuchi received the BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kyoto University in 1973 and the PhD degree in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978.

After working at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology for three years, Electrotechnical Laboratory, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japanese government for five years, and Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University for 10 years, Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo for 19 years, he joined Microsoft as a Principal Researcher in 2015. During this tenure, he supervised more than 50 PhD students.

His research interest spans computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. In these research fields, he has received several best paper awards, including the David Marr Prize in computational vision for the paper “Shape from Interreflection”, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society K. S. Fu memorial best transaction paper award for the paper “Toward Automatic Robot Instruction from Perception-Mapping Human Grasps to Manipulator Grasps”. In addition, in 1992, his paper “Numerical Shape from Shading and Occluding Boundaries” was selected as one of the most influential papers to have appeared in the Artificial Intelligence Journal within the past 10 years.

His community service includes: general chair of IROS95, ITSC99, IV01, ICCV05, ACCV07, ICCV17; program chair of CVPR96, ICCV03, ICRA09, ICPR12, ICCV15; EIC of IJCV (2000-2017), EIC of IJ ITS (2012-2014), associate editor of IEEE Trans. RA, IEEE Trans. PAMI; and a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2000-2002, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 2004-2006 and IEEE Computer Society in 2008-2010.

Through these research and society service, he was awarded a (life) fellow from IEEE, IEICE, IPSJ and RSJ.

He received the Distinguished Researcher Award from IEEE-PAMI, the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (紫綬褒章) from Japanese Emperor, the Okawa prize from Okawa foundation as well as a couple of research achievement awards from Japanese professional societies.

Chris Thrasher

Chris Thrasher is a Partner Software Development Engineer at Microsoft and works with the Computer Vision engineering team.  Over the two-plus decades in industry, he has worked on a variety of technologies: HTML browsers, speech recognition engines, video conferencing, business telephony, language modelling, AI programming platforms, and mobile keyboards.   Chris has also worked at Google, as well as a small engineering startup in Boston.  He has a bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.