Computer Science and Engineering PhD student LI Haotian was named a 2022 Microsoft Research Asia Fellow, becoming one of the 12 Fellows who were selected from nearly 200 outstanding applicants from leading research universities and institutions in the Asia-Pacific region in the fields of computational science, hardware and software systems, human and machine intelligence, and perception, recognition and interaction.

Among the 12 fellowship recipients from academic institutions in China, Japan, and South Korea, Haotian is the only one from Hong Kong.

The Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Fellowship Program aims to empower and encourage PhD students in the Asia-Pacific region to realize their potential in computer science-related research through offering a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to them. Each winner has the opportunity to complete an internship, during which they participate in hands-on, advanced research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.

Supervised by Prof. QU Huamin, Haotian’s research interests include data visualization, visual analytics, and human-computer interaction. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of data, both in type and quantity. However, humans’ ability to analyze data does not match such fast growth. To address the challenge, intelligent visual analysis tools have gained growing interest since they enable accurate and rapid data sensemaking by leveraging humans’ high-bandwidth vision systems. Haotian’s research aims to promote human-in-the-loop intelligent visual analysis with techniques from visualization, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. To achieve the goal, he devoted himself to understanding real-world practices of visualizations for data analysis and leveraging the findings to develop intelligent visual analysis tools. By combining the efforts in the two directions, he hopes to contribute to an ecosystem where humans can perform effortless and adaptive visual data analysis with the support of machine intelligence. With the ecosystem, everyone can analyze data visually without barriers.