Prof. YANG Qiang, Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and Chief AI Officer of WeBank, was elected as the general chair of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), which will be held on February 2-9, 2021 in Vancouver, Canada.

A top conference in the field, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference aims to promote research in AI and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

The general chair position was first introduced in the 2020 conference and Prof. Yang is the second general chair to date. The new role was created to enable the program chair to focus on the quality control of the rapidly growing paper submissions.

Further to this achievement, Prof. Yang was recently selected for inclusion on the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List (AI 2000), which named 2,000 of the world’s top-cited research scholars from the fields of AI over the next 10 years (2020-2029).

The AI 2000 Annual List covers 20 sub-fields, where Prof. Yang was ranked first in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence/International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI/IJCAI) sub-field and 43rd in the information retrieval and recommendation sub-field.

The list is jointly announced by Tsinghua-Chinese Academy of Engineering’s Joint Research Center for Knowledge and Intelligence, and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University. It is automatically generated and determined by computer algorithms deployed in the Tsinghua AMiner system that tracks and ranks scholars based on citation counts collected by top-venue publications over the past 10 years (2009-2019). The list is widely recognized by renowned universities and organizations, including the University of California Berkeley, Cornell University, Duke University, National University of Singapore, and others.