Dr. Qi Tian is currently the Chief Scientist in Artificial Intelligence at Huawei Cloud. He was the Chief Scientist in Computer Vision at Huawei Noah’s Ark Laboratory from 2018-2020. Before he joined Huawei, Dr. Tian was a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) from 2002-2019. He is an IEEE Fellow (2016), IEAS Academician (2021), CAAI Fellow (2022), CCF Fellow (2023), a Yangtze River Chaired Professor of the Ministry of Education (2017), an Oversea Expert by the Chinese Academy of Science (2014). He received the prestigious 2021 Wu Wenjun Outstanding Contribution Award for Artificial Intelligence by CAAI (three per year).
Dr. Tian received his Ph.D. in ECE from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2002 and received his B.E. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1992 and M.S. in ECE from Drexel University in 1996, respectively. Dr. Tian’s research interests include computer vision, multimedia content analysis, image and video indexing and retrieval, and machine learning, and published over 760 refereed journal and conference papers (including 229 IEEE/ACM Transactions and 257 CCF A Category Conference Papers). He was the co-author of eight best papers including ACM Multimedia 2022, ICME 2019, etc.
Dr. Tian’s past research projects were funded by ARO, NSF, DHS, Google, FXPAL, NEC, Blippar, SALSI, CIAS, Akiira Media Systems, HP and UTSA. He received 2017 UTSA President Distinguished Award for Research Achievement and 2010 Google Faculty Research Award. He is the Associate Editor of IEEE TMM, TCSVT, ACM TOMM, MMSJ, and MVA. Dr. Tian has served as SIGMM Executive Committee Member-at-large (2019-2022), Chair of Visual Signal Processing & Communication Technical Committee (VSPC-TC), IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), 2018-2020, founding member of International Steering Committee for ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR, 2009-2014), ACM Multimedia Conference Review Committee Member (2009-2012), and International Steering Committee Member for ACM MIR (2006-2010), ACM ICIMCS 2013, ICME 2006 and 2009, PCM 2012, and IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2011. He has served as general chair for ACM Multimedia Asia 2020, ACM Multimedia 2015, program coordinator for ACM Multimedia 2009, and area chairs for various international conferences including ICCV (2023, 2017), CVPR(2022, 2017), ACM MM (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2011), ECCV(2016), ACM ICMR(2018), etc. He has also served in various organization committees as Panel and Tutorial Chair, Publicity Chair, Special Session Chair, Track hair in numerous ACM and IEEE conferences such as ACM Multimedia, VCIP, PCM, CIVR, ICME, and served as TPC members for prestigious conferences such as ACM Multimedia, SIGIR, ICCV, and KDD.
In industry, as the Chief Scientist in Artificial Intelligence at Huawei Cloud, Dr.Tian has been applying the AI algorithms to real-world scenarios. He realized that AI will never be successful if engineers keep customizing an algorithm for each scenario that can incur heavy human labor. To overcome the difficulty, he led the team to construct a series of Pangu large-scale pre-trained models. As one of his representative work, Pangu-Weather was published in Nature in July 2023. Together with Google and Nvidia, Pangu-Weather was part of “the AI weather forecaster” recognized as Science’s 10 breakthroughs of 2023. In February 2024, Pangu-Weather AI Model was ranked 1st in Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2023, China by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
