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 an 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 track co-chair of ICME 2011. He has also served on international conference program committees, including ACM Multimedia 2007-2011, WWW 2008-2010, SIGIR 2007-2011, SIGKDD 2010, ICCV 2011, 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 17 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.

Selected Publications (Publication List)

  1. Wenbin Tang, Rui Cai, Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Contextual Synonym Dictionary for Visual Object Retrieval, ACM Multimedia 2011
  2. Qiang Hao, Rui Cai, Yanwei Pang, Lei Zhang, From One Tree to a Forest: a Unified Solution for Structured Web Data Extraction, SIGIR 2011
  3. Linkai Wen, Zhiwei Li, Rui Cai, and Lei Zhang, Query by Document via a Decomposition-Based Two-Level Retrieval Approach, SIGIR 2011
  4. Bing Li, Rong Xiao, Zhiwei Li, Rui Cai, Bao-Liang Lu, Lei Zhang, Rank-SIFT: Learning to Rank Repeatable Local Interest Points, CVPR 2011
  5. Yang Cao, Changhu Wang, Liqing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Edgel Index for Large-Scale Sketch-based Image Search, CVPR 2011
  6. Xin Lu, Changhu Wang, Jiang-Ming Yang, Yanwei Pang, Lei Zhang, Photo2Trip: Generating Travel Routes from Geo-Tagged Photos for Trip Planning, ACM Multimedia 2010
  7. Yang Cao, Hai Wang, Changhu Wang, Zhiwei Li, Liqing Zhang, Lei Zhang. MindFinder: Interactive Sketch-based Image Search on Millions of Images (Demo). ACM Multimedia 2010. (Best Demo Award)
  8. Xin-Jing Wang, Lei Zhang, Ming Liu, Yi Li, Wei-Ying Ma, ARISTA - Image Search to Annotation on Billions of Web Photos, CVPR 2010
  9. Xiao Zhang, Gang Hua, Lei Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum, Interest Seam Image,CVPR 2010.
  10. Yang Cao, Changhu Wang, Zhiwei Li, Liqing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Spatial-Bag-of-Features, CVPR 2010.
  11. Xiao Zhang, Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, and Heung-Yeung Shum, Efficient Indexing for Large Scale Visual Search, ICCV 2009
  12. Chen Lin, Jiang-Ming Yang, Rui Cai, Xin-Jing Wang, Wei Wang, and Lei Zhang, Simultaneously Modeling Semantics and Structure of Threaded Discussions: A Sparse Coding Approach. SIGIR 2009
  13. Jiang-Ming Yang, Rui Cai, Yida Wang, Jun Zhu, Lei Zhang, and Wei-Ying Ma, Incorporating Site-Level Knowledge to Extract Structured Data from Web Forums. WWW 2009
  14. Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Delivering Online Advertisements Inside Images, ACM Multimedia 2008
  15. Xin-Jing Wang, Lei Zhang, Xirong Li, Wei-Ying Ma, Annotating Images by Mining Image Search Results, IEEE T-PAMI 2008
  16. Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang, Hong-Jiang Zhang, Learning to Reduce the Semantic Gap in Web Image Retrieval and Annotation, SIGIR 2008
  17. Yida Wang, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Rui Cai, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Exploring Traversal Strategy for Efficient Web Forum Crawling, SIGIR 2008
  18. Yijuan Lu, Lei Zhang, Qi Tian, Wei-Ying Ma, What Are the High-Level Concepts with Small Semantic Gaps? CVPR2007
  19. Rui Cai, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Yida Wang, Lei Zhang, iRobot: An Intelligent Crawler for Web Forums, WWW 2008
  20. Xirong Li, Xin-Jing Wang, Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang, SBIA: Search-based Image Annotation by Leveraging Web-Scale Images (Demo), ACM Multimedia 2007
  21. Zhiwei Li, Xing Xie, Lei Zhang, and Wei-Ying Ma, Searching One Billion Web Images by Content: Challenges and Opportunities, International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis and Mining (MCAM), 2007
  22. Changhu Wang, Feng Jing, Lei Zhang, and Hong-Jiang Zhang, Content-Based Image Annotation Refinement, CVPR 2007
  23. Lei Zhang, Le Chen, Feng Jing, Defeng Deng, Wei-Ying Ma, EnjoyPhoto: A Vertical Image Search Engine for Enjoying High-Quality Photos, ACM Multimedia 2006
  24. Feng Jing, Changhu Wang, Yuhuan Yao, Kefeng Deng, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, IGroup: Web Image Search Results Clustering, ACM Multimedia 2006

  25. Xirong Li, Le Chen, Lei Zhang, Fuzong Lin, Wei-Ying Ma, Image Annotation by Large-Scale Content-based Image Retrieval, ACM Multimedia 2006

  26. Xinjing Wang, Lei Zhang, Feng Jing, Wei-Ying Ma, AnnoSearch: Image Auto-Annotation by Search, CVPR 2006

  27. Lei Zhang, Yuxiao Hu, Mingjing Li, Weiying Ma, Hongjiang Zhang, Efficient Propagation for Face Annotation in Family Albums, ACM Multimedia 2004

  28. Xuezheng Liu, Lei Zhang, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Dingxing Wang, Boosting Image Classification with LDA-based Feature Combination for Digital Photograph Management, Pattern Recognition, Special Issue on Image Understanding for Digital Photos, 2004

  29. Yuxiao Hu, Dalong Jiang, Shuicheng Yan, Lei Zhang, Hongjiang Zhang, Automatic 3D Reconstruction for Face Recognition, IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2004

  30. Lei Zhang, Longbin Chen, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Bayesian face annotation in family albums (demo), ICCV 2003.

  31. Lei Zhang, Longbin Chen, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Automated annotation of human faces in family albums, ACM Multimedia 2003.

  32. Lei Zhang, Fuzong Lin, Bo Zhang. Support Vector Machine Learning for Image Retrieval. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2001). Thessaloniki, Greece. October, 2001:721-724

Professional Activities

Last Modified: October 28, 2011