Harry Shum facts for kids

Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum (Chinese: 沈向洋; pinyin: Shěn Xiàngyáng) is a brilliant computer scientist from China. He was born in October 1966. Harry Shum is famous for his work with computers. He helped create the search engine called Bing. He also did important research on how computers can "see" and understand images, which is called computer vision. He also worked on computer graphics, which is about making images and animations on computers.

Harry Shum used to be a top leader at Microsoft. He was the Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research. This means he led all the work on artificial intelligence (AI) and research at Microsoft.

Early Life and Education

Harry Shum grew up in Nanjing, China. He went to Southeast University in Nanjing and earned his first degree. Later, he got a master's degree from Hong Kong University.

He then traveled to the United States to study more. He went to Carnegie Mellon University. In 1996, he earned his PhD in robotics from their School of Computer Science. Robotics is about designing and building robots.

Career at Microsoft

In 1996, Harry Shum started working at Microsoft Research in Redmond. This is a special part of Microsoft where scientists do new research.

Two years later, in 1998, he moved to China. He helped start Microsoft Research China. This office was later renamed Microsoft Research Asia. In 2004, he became the leader of Microsoft Research Asia.

Harry Shum continued to move up at Microsoft. In 2006, he was named a "Distinguished Engineer." This is a very high honor at Microsoft. In 2007, he became a Corporate Vice President. He led the team that developed the Bing search engine.

By 2013, Harry Shum was in charge of all of Microsoft's technology and research. This included overseeing Microsoft Research. From 2016, he led the company's efforts in artificial intelligence (AI). He guided the overall plan and research for AI at Microsoft.

Harry Shum left Microsoft in February 2020. After that, in March 2020, he became a special professor at Tsinghua University in China. He helps lead their PhD program for computer vision and computer graphics. In March 2023, he was also chosen to be the Council Chairman of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Research and Achievements

Harry Shum has written over 200 research papers. These papers have been shared at international conferences and in science journals. Most of his work focuses on computer graphics and computer vision.

He is known for his early work in "interactive computer vision." This is about making computers understand images in a way that lets people interact with them easily. He also worked on "image-based modeling and rendering." This is an important area in computer graphics for making very realistic images.

When he worked on Bing, he also became active in research about web search and data mining. This involves finding useful information from large amounts of data on the internet.

Harry Shum has received many important awards for his work:

• In 2006, he was named an IEEE Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
• In 2007, he was recognized as an ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery.
• In 2017, he was chosen as a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). This was for his contributions to computer vision and graphics, and for his leadership in research and product development.
• Also in 2017, he received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Hong Kong.
• In 2018, he was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK.

See also

• List of International Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering