Harry Shum facts for kids

Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum (Chinese: 沈向洋; pinyin: Shěn Xiàngyáng; born October 1966) is a famous Chinese computer scientist. He is known for his important work in computer vision and computer graphics. He also helped develop the search engine Bing. Harry Shum was a top leader at Microsoft, where he guided their work in AI and research. He studied under a well-known professor named Raj Reddy.

Early Life and Education

Harry Shum was born and 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 at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1996, he earned his PhD in robotics from their School of Computer Science. A PhD is a very advanced university degree.

His Journey 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 Microsoft Research China when it first opened. This office was later renamed Microsoft Research Asia. By 2004, he became the Managing Director, which means he was in charge of Microsoft Research Asia.

He continued to rise in his career at Microsoft. In 2006, he was named a "Distinguished Engineer." This is a high honor for engineers at Microsoft. In 2007, he became a Corporate Vice President for Bing Product Development. This meant he helped lead the team that built the Bing search engine.

By 2013, Harry Shum became Microsoft's Executive Vice President for Technology & Research. This was a very big role. He oversaw all of Microsoft's research efforts, including Microsoft Research. From 2016, he led the AI & Research Group. In this role, he guided all of Microsoft's plans and research for AI. He left Microsoft in early 2020.

Research and Achievements

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

• Computer Vision: This field teaches computers to "see" and understand images and videos. For example, it helps computers recognize faces or objects.
• Computer Graphics: This field is about creating images and animations using computers. Think of the special effects in movies or video games.

He was a pioneer in "interactive computer vision." This means he worked on ways for computers to understand what they see in real-time, as people interact with them. He also worked on "image-based modeling and rendering." This is an important area for making very realistic computer graphics. More recently, while working on Bing, he also focused on web search and data mining. Data mining is about finding patterns in large amounts of information.

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 became 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 technology research.
• In 2018, he was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK.

Beyond Microsoft

After leaving Microsoft, Harry Shum continued to contribute to the world of technology and education. In March 2020, he became a professor at Tsinghua University in China. There, he helps lead a PhD program for students studying computer vision and computer graphics. In March 2023, he was also appointed as the Council Chairman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

See also

• List of International Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering