Lei Zhang is a lead researcher in the Web Search & Mining Group at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, and an adjunct professor of Tianjin University.
Lei joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2001 and worked with the Media Computing Group on key projects such as image classification, red-eye detection, face detection and annotation. Since 2004, he moved to his current post in the Web Search & Mining Group, and has worked on large-scale systems related to search and multimedia. Projects include automatic image annotation by search, large scale visual search and indexing, sketch-based image search, website structure analysis, and travel search (http://travel.msra.cn).
Lei is an IEEE senior member and a senior ACM member, and has served as editorial board members for Multimedia System Journal since 2011, as program co-chair for MMM 2010, program co-chair for workshop VECTaR 2009 and SWSM 2011, and area chair for ICME 2011, ACM MM 2012, and ICPR 2012. He has also served on international conference program committees, including ACM Multimedia 2007-2012, WWW 2008-2010, SIGIR 2007-2011, SIGKDD 2010, ICCV 2011, CVPR 2012, etc. He is author or co-author of more than 100 published papers in fields such as multimedia, computer vision, web search and information retrieval, and holds 20 U.S. patents for his innovation in these fields.
Lei earned a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, in 1993 and 1995. After graduate school, he joined the China Post Academy and helped develop automatic guided vehicles for use in postal sorting centers and a GPS-based tracking system employed in postal vehicles. He later returned to Tsinghua University, and was awarded a doctorate in Computer Science in 2001.
His other interests include photography and outdoor activities with his family.
His profile is also available at Microsoft Academic Search:
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1220659.aspx.
- Arista (lARge-scale Image Search To Annotation)Arista is a data-driven image annotation system, which annotates an image based on large-scale image search. Its assumption is that close similar images share similar semantics. It targets at a practical image annotation engine which is able to automatically annotate images of any popular concepts. Starting from 2006, Arista is now able to perform online tagging based on 2 billion web images leveraging near-duplicate detection technique.
- Picto: A large scale visual indexing and recognition systemIn this project, we focus on developing algorithms for large-scale image indexing and recognition. Our research covers low-level image features, middle level image representations, and indexing and ranking algorithms.
- MindFinder: Finding Images by SketchingSketch-based image search is a well-known and difficult problem, in which little progress has been made in the past decade in developing a large-scale and practical sketch-based search engine. We have revisited this problem and developed a scalable solution to sketch-based image search. The MindFinder system has been built by indexing more than two million web images to enable efficient sketch-based image retrieval, and many creative applications can be expected to advance the state of the art.
- Website Structure Understanding and its ApplicationsWebsite structure understanding can be treated as a reverse engineering for the purpose of automatically discovering the layout templates and URL patterns of a website, and understanding how these templates and patterns are integrated to organize the website. The study of this problem has had a great impact to many applications which can leverage such site-level knowledge to help web search and data mining.
- Travel GuideThe Travel Guide project has the following mission: Showcase innovations to help users better plan, enjoy, and share their travel experiences. During this process, we transfer technologies to product teams, and drive further research from lessons learned in real world deployment. currently the service is limited to China area, http://travel.msra.cn (in Chinese).
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Lei Zhang (张磊)
Lead Researcher
Web Search & Mining Group
Microsoft Research Asia
No. 5 Danling Street, Haidian District
Beijing 100080, P.R.China
Email: leizhang AT microsoft.com
