Computer Science and Engineering PhD student WU Aoyu was awarded a 2021 Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Fellowship. He was one of 11 recipients selected from over 150 PhD candidates from 50 leading research academic institutions in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Recipients are identified as emerging leaders in the Asia-Pacific region with their exceptional talent and innovation in computer science-related research.

The MSRA Fellowship Program aims to empower and encourage PhD students in the Asia-Pacific region to realize their potential in computer science-related research. It offers a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to promising young candidates. Each winner has the opportunity to complete an internship at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.

Supervised by Prof. QU Huamin, Aoyu’s research interests include data visualization and human-computer interaction. He focuses on designing and evaluating intelligent and interactive systems to ease the creation of data visualizations for communication, data analysis, and data-driven decision making. He leads the Pulse of HKUST team, which aims to build a data-driven smart campus at HKUST.

Aoyu’s goal is to make visualizations a “first-class citizen” on the web and more accessible to both humans and computers. Specifically, he tries to build tools that automatically recommend models and visualizations for data analysis to advance the democratization of data science. He plans to create methods for interpreting and understanding the implicit meanings of visualizations at the internet scale. By integrating those two perspectives, he aims to contribute to a new online knowledge ecology – both analyzing web visualizations to distill knowledge and assisting the public in producing new visualizations to communicate information. As a result, that ecology will increase the breadth of the semantic web and make “big data” more accessible and efficient.