PhD Research Excellence Recognized in SENG Award 2017-18
Dr Hao Wang, 2017 PhD graduate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been named the winner of the School of Engineering PhD Research Excellence Award 2017-18.
Dr Wang’s research focuses on Bayesian deep learning (BDL) and statistical machine learning. In particular, his work on BDL seeks to bridge the gap between perception and inference by combining the power of deep learning and graphical models in a single principled framework. In 2015, he was awarded the Microsoft Fellowship in Asia (among only 13 awardees across Asia) and the Baidu Research Fellowship (along with candidates from top universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, Berkeley, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)) for his achievements on BDL and its applications on data mining.
His work on collaborative deep learning (CDL) for recommender systems is the first hierarchical Bayesian model for deep hybrid recommender systems and has received over 240 citations, becoming one of the most cited papers in ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2015. Follow-up works of BDL / CDL have been presented in top conferences such as AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, International World Wide Web Conference, and KDD. Besides, his works are also cited by researchers in leading universities and major industry labs such as MIT, CMU, Google, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research.
Dr Wang is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) of MIT in the US. He shared his experience of his research life at the ceremony of the PhD Research Excellence Award on April 30, 2018 at HKUST. Two PhD student finalists, Mr Ri Wang in Bioengineering and Mr Pak Ming Cheung in Electronic and Computer Engineering, were also recognized for their research excellence at the ceremony.
The School of Engineering has established the PhD Research Excellence Award scheme since 2011 in appreciation of the outstanding research achievements of engineering students and recent graduates. The awards are granted to those who have made influential contributions to their disciplines during PhD studies at HKUST.
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