CUHK(SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab Established to Co-Train Doctoral Students
On the afternoon of June 15, CUHK (SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab was officially unveiled. Xu Jianling, Deputy Director of Shenzhen Bureau of Education, Chen Qingyun, Director of Electronic Information Technology Division of Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Commission, Lin Jianzhong, Deputy Director of Longgang District People's Congress Standing Committee, Zhu Yun, Director of Longgang Science and Technology Department, Prof. Tom Z.Q. LUO, Vice President (Academic) of CUHK-Shenzhen, Prof. Tony LI, Associate Vice President, Prof. Shuguang Cui, Chair Professor of CUHK-Shenzhen, Dr. Zhou Bowen, Vice President of JD Group, Dr. Xiaodong He, Deputy Director of the AI Research Institute of JD, Ms. Zhou Beixing, Academic Cooperation Director of the AI Research Institute, and nearly 200 guests and teachers and students attended the unveiling ceremony.On the afternoon of June 15, CUHK (SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab was officially unveiled. Xu Jianling, Deputy Director of Shenzhen Bureau of Education, Chen Qingyun, Director of Electronic Information Technology Division of Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Commission, Lin Jianzhong, Deputy Director of Longgang District People's Congress Standing Committee, Zhu Yun, Director of Longgang Science and Technology Department, Prof. Tom Z.Q. LUO, Vice President (Academic) of CUHK-Shenzhen, Prof. Tony LI, Associate Vice President, Prof. Shuguang Cui, Chair Professor of CUHK-Shenzhen, Dr. Zhou Bowen, Vice President of JD Group, Dr. Xiaodong He, Deputy Director of the AI Research Institute of JD, Ms. Zhou Beixing, Academic Cooperation Director of the AI Research Institute, and nearly 200 guests and teachers and students attended the unveiling ceremony.
The Joint Laboratory will be chaired by Prof. Shuguang Cui of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen , and Dr. He Xiaodong, Executive Vice President of the AI Research Institute of JD Group. The Joint Laboratory will leverage on the advantages of both sides, and through joint training of doctoral students, joint research, and other forms, it will carry out in-depth cooperation in artificial intelligence fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning, and build a world-class complete ecosystem integrating production, research and innovation.
CUHK (SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab will rely on the world-class talents and academic research advantages of the university and the advantages of research and development and industrial applications of JD Group's AI platform and research department to jointly train doctoral students and introduce international high-end talents for joint research work. The jointly-trained Ph.D. students will be under the joint guidance of the mentors of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the JD Group, aiming at academic frontiers to carry out research work. Dr. Zhou Bowen, Dr. He Xiaodong, Dr. Mei Tao, and other scientists of JD Group will serve as joint mentors. The Joint Laboratory will undertake scientific research projects and apply for scientific research funds externally, and solve important problems in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Joint Lab is financially independent. The funding for doctoral students is provided by JD Group. It will also provide internship opportunities for doctoral students. Qualified graduates will be awarded doctoral degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Joint Lab will also recruit postdocs worldwide.
Prof. Luo, Vice President of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, addresses the audience
The cultivation of high-end artificial intelligence personnel requires basic accumulation and practice. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, as an international high-level research university, has made great progress in many aspects such as talent introduction, scientific research and industrial incubation after four years of development. CUHK-Shenzhen has formed a significant social influence in the areas of robotics, smart manufacturing, and big data. In the aspect of talent introduction, CUHK-Shenzhen recruits first-rate faculty members globally. Most of the teachers introduced are renowned professors and scholars of world-class universities, including Nobel Prize winners and academicians, who will satisfy the development needs of emerging industries in the country and the Pearl River Delta region, especially in scientific research fields such as robotics, smart manufacturing, big data, and information science. The University has established the National-Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Robot and Intelligent Manufacturing, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data (SRIBD), Shenzhen Finance Institute, Robot Institute of CUHKSZ, three Nobel Prize laureate institutes (Ciechanover Institute of Precision and Regenerative Medicine, Kobilka Institute of Innovative Drug Discovery, and Arieh Warshel Institute of Computational Biology) and a Turing Award scientist laboratory (Hopcroft Institute for Advanced Study in Information Sciences). In 2018, the University also established The Institute for Data and Decision Analytics, focusing on interdisciplinary research in operations research, statistics, operations management, and decision science. The institute will work closely with the existing three schools of the university to provide impetus for the growth of digital technology in the future.
Dr. Zhou Bowen, Vice President of JD Group, addresses the audience
JD AI Research focuses on continuous algorithmic innovation and closely integrates JD's actual business scenarios to lead the upgrading of the industry. The focus areas of the institute are: NLP, voice, computer vision, and machine learning (including deep learning and reinforcement learning). Currently, there are research centers in Beijing and Silicon Valley, and more will be successively established in the United Kingdom and other European regions. With JD's large and accurate data base and very clear application scenarios, as well as the introduction of core talents, JD AI Research will focus on improving AI's diversity in areas including smart consumption, smart supply, smart logistics, financial technology, and physical retail technology with continuous investment and innovation.
JD AI Research emphasizes the mutual complementarity of research and application. Its basic research focuses on computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning. It has achieved excellent rankings in various international competitions, and the research papers have also been accepted by international top academic conferences. For example, the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory of JD AI Research stood out in CVPR 2018 "Look Into Person" International Competition with two championships in the single and multiplayer human pose estimation section and one runner-up in the single human pose analysis unit. Five papers of JD AI scientists were accepted by NAACL, the top conference for natural language processing. The application of technology focuses on the three core businesses of retail e-commerce, finance, and logistics. It not only applied its results in JD's intelligent identity system and JIMI intelligent robots, but also developed an artificial intelligence open platform Neuhub.
Speech by Xu Jianling, Director of Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Education
CUHK(SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab is the second university-enterprise joint laboratory of CUHK-Shenzhen. We believe CUHK(SZ)-JD Joint AI Lab and CUHK(Shenzhen)-Tencent AI Lab Joint Laboratory of Machine Intelligence will start from Shenzhen and conduct research on the academic frontiers and cutting-edge core technologies in the world to jointly cultivate high-end talents and become two powerful engines that will produce a number of impressive research results in the future.
The Joint Lab sincerely welcomes excellent students at home and abroad. The application materials are similar to those of American universities, but no GRE score is required. Please refer to The University's Postgraduate Admissions Rules at http://www.cuhk.edu.cn/graduate-school/phd-mphil/ for admission requirements and procedures for doctoral candidates.
Prof. Shuguang Cui (right) of CUHK-Shenzhen and Dr. He Xiaodong, Deputy Dean of AI Research of JD Group, signed an agreement
Lab Director Profile:
Prof. Shuguang Cui received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2005 and used to worked as an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, and Child Family Chair Professor at Texas A&M University and University of California, Davis. He is currently the Vice Director of Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data and a chair professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
Professor Cui's current research direction focuses on data-driven large-scale system control and resource management. Nearly 200 papers of Prof. Cui have been published in world-class journals and conferences, and have been cited more than 14,000 times with Google. He was selected as the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and included by Sciencewatch among the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. He was the recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2012 Best Paper Award and two conference best paper awards. He has been serving as co-chairs, Area Editor, and associate editors of many professional conferences, journals (IEEE TBD, TSP, TWC, TVT, CL) and committees(WTC). He was appointed as a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Big Data and the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Also, he was elected as an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer in 2014.
