Leadership

Chair:

Dr. Tao Wang is a Senior Manager in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning R&D division at SAS Institute Inc. He leads a development team in the research and implementation of cloud-based machine learning algorithms for big data. Tao also represents SAS at the Data Mining Group. He received his PhD in computing science from the University of Alberta in 2010. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and multimedia processing. Tao has been a reviewer for many technical journals, including Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He is the chair of the RTP ACM Chapter and IEEE SMC Human Perception in Multimedia Computing Society and has served on several IEEE Technical Program Committees. Tao has multiple publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings and has won many international, national, institutional, and departmental awards for his achievements.

Vice Chair:

Dr. Tianfu Wu received Ph.D. degree in Statistics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011. He joined NC State University in August 2016 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Visual Narrative. He is assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He works on computer vision, deep learning, deep grammar models, cost-sensitive bottom-up/top- down inference, lifelong learning by ALTER (Ask, Learn, Test, Explain and Refine). He has published over 30 papers on computer vision, statistical and deep learning and computing. His research has been focused on the three aspects: (i) Statistical learning of large scale and highly expressive hierarchical and compositional models from small or big data. (ii) Statistical inference by learning near-optimal cost-sensitive decision policies. (iii) Statistical theory of performance guaranteed learning algorithm and inference procedure.

Treasurer/Secretary:

Dr. Ruiwen Zhang is a Senior Researcher in Machine Learning at SAS Institute. Her research interest includes active learning, feature selection, graphical model and high-dimensional data. She received her Ph.D. degree from Department of Statistics and Operation Research at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.