Mar 10, 2021|

Top AI Scholar Heads JD Explore Academy  

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by Kelly Dawson

Renowned AI scholar Dacheng Tao has been appointed the director of JD Explore Academy, where he will lead the team to explore innovative artificial intelligence applications that might drive JD.com’s business in the future.

“JD is very ambitious in developing advanced technologies for transforming the digital industry,” Tao said
 Dacheng Tao is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of AI and information sciences

“JD is very ambitious in developing advanced technologies for transforming the digital industry,” Tao said. “I’m excited to join the team, and hope to carry out its mission to explore new fundamental technologies.”

As an internationally recognized scholar in the field of AI and information sciences with a focus on machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and image processing among other topics, Tao is well positioned to tackle the challenge. He has published more than 500 papers in top international conferences and journals, winning “best conference paper” and “test of time” awards multiple times. Moreover, his papers have been cited nearly 60,000 times as a demonstration of how essential his research is to the field of AI.

This year he was selected as an American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, a distinction given to those who “help revolutionize medicine and related fields to enhance and extend the lives of people all over the world,” according to the organization. In 2019 Tao was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), comprising an elite group that have made significant contributions in the field. He was also listed in the Australian Lifetime Achievers Leaderboard in Engineering and Computer Science last year.

In 2018, he received one of the highest technical achievements in the field of data science, the IEEE ICDM Research Contribution Award, on top of having won the Australian Eureka Award twice, in both 2015 and 2020. In 2015 he also won the Vice Chancellor’s Medal of the University of Technology Sydney. He is also a foreign member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of New South Wales, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Recently he won the IEEE 2021 Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, which honors people who have made outstanding innovative contributions in the field of computer information science and engineering over the past decade. Tao, who won “for exceptional contributions to representation learning and its applications,” is the only Chinese scientist to have won the award in 2021.

JD Explore Academy was established earlier this year, and will focus on six major digital and intelligent technology sectors, including AI, data science, decentralized computing, quantum computing, engineering and management, and ethics and science. The academy will attempt to realize disruptive technologies from the basic theoretical level in order to better serve the development of the real economy, and will recruit top talent from all over the world in order to achieve this goal. Tao joins JD Explore Academy as part of that effort.

 

(kellydawson@jd.com)

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