Dr. HongJiang Zhang is the Managing Director of Advanced Technology Center (ATC), Microsoft Research, a R&D center of over 300 engineers working on advanced technologies and products in the areas of web service, mobile, unified communication, gaming, servers, developer tools and serviceability. He is also the Vice President of Microsoft China R&D Group, helping the President overseeing Microsoft¡¯s overall China R&D strategy.

Dr. Zhang was the Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, in charge of research and technology transfer in areas of Natural Language Computing, Media Computing, Data Mining and Web Search, and Distributed Systems. His leadership and outstanding achievement, marked by high impact in academia and Microsoft¡¯s products, are critical in establishing Microsoft Research Asia into a world class basic research center in computer science. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Zhang was with Hewlett-Packard Labs at Palo Alto, CA, where he was a research manager, working on multimedia content retrieval and management technologies, and intelligent image and video processing. He also worked at the Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore, where he led several projects in video and image content analysis and retrieval, computer vision and multimedia information systems.

Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of IEEE and well-known for his leadership in media computing and his pioneering work in video and image content analysis, representation, retrieval and browsing. He has authored four books, over 350 scientific papers and holds over 30 US patents. Many of his research works have become classic references in their respective research areas and have formed the technology basis for several startup companies. He currently serves as the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transaction on Multimedia and on the editorial board of Proceedings of IEEE.

Dr. Zhang received a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Zhengzhou University, China, both in Electrical Engineering.