Dr. Wei LAI
	Associate Researcher
	Web Intelligence (WIT) Group Web Search and Mining Group Microsoft Research Asia
	5F Sigma Center, 49 Zhichun Road,  Beijing 100080, P. R. China
	Tel:	+ 86 - 10 - 5917 5162
	Fax:	+ 86 - 10 - 8809 7306
	Email:
	Blog:	http://laiwei.spaces.live.com/

Dr. Lai is an associate researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He received the B.E. degree in electronic engineering and Ph.D. degree in signals and information processing from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China, in 2000 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include web search and data mining, multimedia information processing. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.

Projects 

• Microsoft Academic Search (微软学术搜索)
  • Name validity problem
  • Citation context analysis of the research papers (Example)
  • Bing Answer for Microsoft Academic Search (Example)
• Travel FAQ
  • Large scale, automatically crawling and extraction from online comunities
  • Travel specific information classification and understanding
  • Shipped in Microsoft Travel Guild (微软旅游指南), a popular travel service
    • Example link: FAQ about San Ya (三亚)
• FoCUS: Forum Crawling, Understanding and Summarizing
  • Data extraction from forums and online communities
  • High quality Question and Answer Extraction
  • Social network computing
• Social Media search
  • Crawling of Structured Web sites, User created contents
  • Mining of web communities
• Video Search: Content-Based Ranking and Presentation 
• Content-based video duplicate detection
• Video AdLive: Content-aware, User-Centric Video Advertisment

Selected Publications (Full List)

• Yida Wang, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Rui Cai, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma "Exploring traversal strategy for web forum crawling", In Proceedings of the 31^st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR'08), 20-24 July 2008, Singapore, Pages 459-466. Abstract | PDF
• Rui Cai, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Yida Wang, Lei Zhang, "iRobot: An Intelligent Crawler for Web Forums", In Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2008), 21-25 April, 2008, Beijing, China. Abstract | PDF
• Jingjing Liu, Wei Lai, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shipeng Li, "Video Search Re-Ranking via Multi-Graph Propagation", In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM'07), 24-29 September, 2007, Augsburg, Germany. Abstract | PDF 
• Tao Mei, Xian-Sheng Hua, Wei Lai, Linjun Yang, et al, "MSRA-USTC-SJTU AT TRECVID 2007: HIGH-LEVEL FEATURE EXTRACTION AND SEARCH", TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation - TRECVID, 2007. Abstract | PDF
• Lu Liu, Wei Lai, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shi-Qiang Yang, "ON REAL-TIME DETECTING DUPLICATE WEB VIDEOS", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Abstract | PDF
• Rui Cai, Lei Zhang, Feng Jing, Wei Lai, Wei-Ying Ma, "AUTOMATED MUSIC VIDEO GENERATION USING WEB IMAGE RESOURCE", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Abstract | PDF
• Wei Lai, Xian-Sheng Hua, Wei-Ying Ma, "Towards Content-Based Relevance Ranking for Video Search", In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 23-27 October, 2006, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. Abstract | PDF
• Lu Liu, Wei Lai, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shi-Qiang Yang, "Video Histogram: A Novel Video Signature for Efficient Web Video Duplicate Detection", In Proceedings of International Multimedia Modeling Conference (MMM), Singapore, Jan. 2007. Abstract | PDF
• Xun Yuan, Wei Lai, Tao Mei, Xian-Sheng Hua, Xiu-Qing Wu, Shipeng Li. "Automatic Video Genre Categorization Using Hierarchical SVM", In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Atlanta, USA, Oct. 2006. Abstract | PDF

Professional Activities

• Review for Journals and Conferences such as WWWJ, INS, CIKM, etc.
• PC member of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), Hong Kong, China, Nov. 2009
• PC member. The 5th Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS 2009), Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, Oct. 2009
• PC member. EMNLP 2009, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Singapore, Aug. 2009
• Technical Program Committee member of ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM) 2007, Application Track
• Review for: IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT), from 2006.
• Review for: Short Papers, ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), Santa Barbara, CA, Oct. 2006.
• Review for: IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM), HangZhou, P.R.China, Nov. 2006.
• Review for: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, Jul. 2006.