Nine faculty members from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) and Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering (ECE) were 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 artificial intelligence over the next 10 years (2020-2029).

The list covers 20 sub-fields. The top 10 most-cited scholars in each sub-field are named as “AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars” and the top 11–100 scholars are recognized as “AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars Honorable Mention”.

Two professors who made to the world’s top 10 are:

• Prof. YANG Qiang, Chair Professor of CSE and Chief AI Officer of WeBank, ranked 1st 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
• Prof. QU Huamin, Professor of CSE, ranked third in the visualization sub-field

Other awardees include:

• Prof. Khaled BEN LETAIEF, New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor of ECE, ranked 28th in internet of things
• Prof. James KWOK, Professor of CSE, ranked 21st in AAAI/IJCAI
• Prof. Vincent LAU, Chair Professor of ECE, ranked 51st in internet of things
• Prof. Shaojie SHEN, Assistant Professor of ECE, ranked 73rd in robotics
• Prof. ZHANG Tong, Chair Professor of Mathematics and CSE, ranked 68th in machine learning
• Prof. ZHANG Jun, Adjunct Assistant Professor of ECE, ranked 27th in internet of things
• Prof. ZHANG Zhengyou, Adjunct Professor of CSE, ranked 46th in multimedia

​​​In addition, at least four alumni were included on the list. They are Dr. TAO Meixia (33rd in internet of things), Dr. YIN Jie (78th in AAAI/IJCAI), who were also among the 179 female scholars (corresponding to 9.7%) on the Women in AI 2000 List, and Dr. WONG Kai-Kit and Dr. Ernest S. LO (58th and 69th respectively in internet of things). All of them received their PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s ECE Department (Meixia, Kai-Kit and Ernest) or CSE Department (Jie).

The AI 2000 Annual 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.