Harry Shum

Overview

Harry Shum (Chinese name 沈向洋) is a computer scientist whose career has centred on Microsoft's research organisation and, later, on the company's artificial intelligence strategy. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow, recognised for work in computer vision and computer graphics^[1].

Education

Shum took his bachelor's degree at Southeast University, which was formerly the Nanjing Institute of Technology^[2]. He then earned an MPhil in electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Hong Kong^[2], and in 1996 completed a PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University^[1][2]. Robotics research deals with how a machine perceives and acts in the physical world, and the perception half of that problem overlaps heavily with computer vision: recovering the shape, motion and position of objects from images.

Building a research lab in Beijing

In 1996 Shum joined Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington^[1]. In 1998 he moved to Beijing as one of the founding members of Microsoft Research China — the lab later renamed Microsoft Research Asia — where he rose to managing director and Distinguished Engineer^[1][2]. Founding members of a new lab do two jobs at once: they carry out their own research, and they set the standards (hiring, review, what counts as a good problem) by which everyone who joins later is measured. Shum's own specialties, vision and graphics, were among the areas the Beijing lab became known for.

Search and product work

From 2007 to 2013 Shum was a corporate vice president responsible for product development for Bing search^[1]. Search is an unusually research-heavy product: ranking, understanding what a query means, and searching over images all draw on the same statistical and vision methods that appear in research papers, so the step from a lab to a product group is shorter than it looks.

Leading AI and Research

Shum later served as executive vice president of Microsoft's AI and Research group, leading its AI strategy and Microsoft Research^[1]. Grouping the research labs together with the product teams that apply machine learning puts long-horizon work and near-term engineering under one leader, which is what such an organisation is for. Microsoft says the role lasted until 1 March 2020^[1]; a biography published by HKUST gives February 2020^[2]. The two accounts differ by about a month, and both place the end of his executive tenure at the start of 2020.

Recognition and academic ties

Shum was elected a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2017^[1][2], and became an International Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering in 2018^[2]. He has been an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University since 2003^[2], a part-time tie to a Chinese university that runs alongside his industry work.

Why he matters

Shum's career traces two threads that are often separate. One is institution building: helping to start a basic-research laboratory in Beijing and turn it into a place where a generation of vision and graphics researchers could work. The other is translation: carrying research methods into a mass-market search product and then into a company-wide AI strategy. The honours he holds are recognition from the research communities in both of those worlds.