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.

He currently directs a team pursuing new research directions on social media search. Team projects include user-created content analysis, structured website analysis, web-scale image annotation, and travel search. Results are targeted toward new advanced services in the delivery of intelligence and insight to Web users.

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. He developed a highly efficient and robust face-detection algorithm that uses a large-scale distributed system for machine learning. The face-detection technology was successfully transferred to many Microsoft products, including Vista, Media Center, and Digital Image Suite. 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 building the RankBase system for training a new dynamic ranker and conducting experiments, and developing a scalable search-based image-annotation system.

Lei is an IEEE and ACM member, and has served as program co-chair of MMM 2010, and served on international conference program committees, including ACM Multimedia, WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, ICME, MMM, PCM, etc. He is the author or co-author of more than 80 published papers in fields such as content-based image retrieval, computer vision, Web search and information retrieval. He also holds ten U.S. patents for his innovation in face-detection, red-eye reduction and image retrieval technologies.

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.

Selected Publications (Publication List)

  1. Xiao Zhang, Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, and Heung-Yeung Shum, Efficient Indexing for Large Scale Visual Search, in Proc. Internal Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Kyoto, Japan, September 2009
  2. 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. In Proc. of SIGIR 2009 Conference, Boston, US, July 2009
  3. Xin-Jing Wang, Mo Yu, Lei Zhang, Rui Cai, Wei-Ying Ma. Argo: Intelligent Advertising by Mining a User's Interest from His Photo Collections, In Proc. of  the 3rd Annual International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising (ADKDD), in conjunction with SIGKDD, Paris, France, June 2009.
  4. 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. In Proc. The International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Conference, Madrid, Spain, April 2009
  5. Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Delivering Online Advertisements Inside Images, ACM Multimedia, Vancouver, Canada, October 2008
  6. Xin-Jing Wang, Lei Zhang, Xirong Li, Wei-Ying Ma, Annotating Images by Mining Image Search Results, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2008
  7. Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang, Hong-Jiang Zhang, Learning to Reduce the Semantic Gap in Web Image Retrieval and Annotation, The 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR), Singapore, July 2008
  8. Yida Wang, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Rui Cai, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Exploring Traversal Strategy for Efficient Web Forum Crawling, The 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR), Singapore, July 2008
  9. Yijuan Lu, Lei Zhang, Qi Tian, Wei-Ying Ma, What Are the High-Level Concepts with Small Semantic Gaps? in Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, USA, June, 2007
  10. Rui Cai, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Yida Wang, Lei Zhang, iRobot: An Intelligent Crawler for Web Forums, The 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Beijing, China, April, 2008
  11. Rui Cai, Chao Zhang, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Scalable Music Recommendation by Search, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Augsburg, Germany, September, 2007
  12. Xirong Li, Xin-Jing Wang, Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang, SBIA: Search-based Image Annotation by Leveraging Web-Scale Images (Demo), in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Augsburg, Germany, September, 2007
  13. Zhiwei Li, Xing Xie, Lei Zhang, and Wei-Ying Ma, Searching One Billion Web Images by Content: Challenges and Opportunities, In Proc. International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis and Mining (MCAM), Weihai, China, July, 2007
  14. Changhu Wang, Feng Jing, Lei Zhang, and Hong-Jiang Zhang, Content-Based Image Annotation Refinement, in Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Minneapolis, USA, June, 2007
  15. Lei Zhang, Le Chen, Feng Jing, Defeng Deng, Wei-Ying Ma, EnjoyPhoto: A Vertical Image Search Engine for Enjoying High-Quality Photos, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Santa Barbara, USA, October, 2006
  16. Feng Jing, Changhu Wang, Yuhuan Yao, Kefeng Deng, Lei Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, IGroup: Web Image Search Results Clustering, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Santa Barbara, USA, October, 2006

  17. Xirong Li, Le Chen, Lei Zhang, Fuzong Lin, Wei-Ying Ma, Image Annotation by Large-Scale Content-based Image Retrieval, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Santa Barbara, USA, October, 2006

  18. Xinjing Wang, Lei Zhang, Feng Jing, Wei-Ying Ma, AnnoSearch: Image Auto-Annotation by Search, in Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New York, USA, June, 2006

  19. Lei Zhang, Yuxiao Hu, Mingjing Li, Weiying Ma, Hongjiang Zhang, Efficient Propagation for Face Annotation in Family Albums, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, New York, US, 2004

  20. 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

  21. Yuxiao Hu, Dalong Jiang, Shuicheng Yan, Lei Zhang, Hongjiang Zhang, Automatic 3D Reconstruction for Face Recognition, in Proc. 6th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Seoul, Korea, 2004

  22. Lei Zhang, Longbin Chen, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Bayesian face annotation in family albums (demo), in Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Nice, France, 2003.

  23. Lei Zhang, Longbin Chen, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Automated annotation of human faces in family albums, in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Berkeley, CA USA, 2003.

  24. Yanfeng Sun, Hongjiang Zhang, Lei Zhang, Mingjing Li, MyPhotos – A System for Home Photo Management and Processing, in Proc. ACM multimedia, demo, 2002

  25. Lei Zhang, Mingjing Li, Hongjiang Zhang, Boosting image orientation detection with indoor vs. outdoor classification, Proc. IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2002

  26. 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

  27. Zhang Lei, Lin Fuzong, Zhang Bo. A CBIR method based on color-spatial feature. Proc. IEEE Region 10 Annual International Conference 1999 (TENCON'99), Cheju, Korea. 1999:166-169

Professional Activities

Friends

    At MSRA, it is a great pleasure working with many talented students with creative ideas and strong passions. Below is a partial list of the students that I have been working with.

 

Last Modified: January 29, 2010