The Outstanding Scientist Award of the NAAI Asian Artificial Intelligence Conference is a top honor paying tribute to outstanding scholars in the AI field. It aims to recognize leaders who have made extraordinary and far-reaching contributions to the development of the industry.
Outstanding Scientist: Qionghai Dai
Qionghai Dai, Tsinghua University, China
Award Citation: Professor Dai has pioneered computational imaging and neuromorphic AI for biomedical science. At Tsinghua University, he developed the world’s first gigapixel fluorescence microscope, enabling cortex-wide neural imaging at subcellular resolution, and advanced neuromorphic optoelectronic computing with reconfigurable diffractive processing units and all-analog optical chips. His work bridges AI, optics, and neuroscience, significantly impacting computational imaging and AI hardware architecture.
Outstanding Scientist: Pingyi Fan
Pingyi Fan, Tsinghua University, China
Award Citation: Professor Fan is recognized for foundational contributions at the intersection of AI and information theory. He developed methods in federated learning, semantic information measures, and generative models, applied to industrial fault detection and 6G+AI systems. His research advances privacy-preserving, communication-efficient machine learning and demonstrates leadership in distributed AI, smart networks, and signal processing.
Outstanding Scientist: Laurence Tianruo Yang
Laurence Tianruo Yang, Zhengzhou University, China
Award Citation: Professor Yang is honored for his advances in AI-driven industrial and cyber-physical systems. He proposed tensor-based recurrent neural networks with differential privacy and secure tensor decomposition methods for federated computing. His models enhance privacy-preserving AI, industrial IoT, and smart manufacturing, integrating tensor methods, multi-view learning, and embedded AI to advance intelligent data analytics in cyber-physical applications.
Outstanding Scientist: Mausam
Mausam, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi), India
Award Citation: Professor Mausam is a leading researcher in NLP and human-centric AI. He pioneered large-scale information extraction, crowdsourced human-computation, and probabilistic planning algorithms. His recent work spans neuro-symbolic machine learning, medical image analysis, and multilingual NLP systems. With over 100 publications and leadership roles in AAAI and NLP communities, his research bridges AI theory and practice across vision, language, and planning.
Outstanding Scientist: Xuelong Li
Xuelong Li, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Award Citation: Professor Li is recognized for his foundational work on high-dimensional data learning and multimodal AI. He developed algorithms for multimodal cognitive computing, transfer learning, and tensor methods, enhancing machine information extraction and pattern recognition. His contributions advance vision, graph learning, and big-data AI, bridging theoretical development with practical applications in imaging, optics, and intelligent systems.
Outstanding Scientist: Mohan Kankanhalli
Mohan Kankanhalli, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
Award Citation: Professor Kankanhalli is an international leader in multimedia computing and trustworthy AI. He made key contributions to image and video understanding, visual saliency, and multimedia security, including content authentication and privacy-preserving algorithms. As Director of the NUS AI Institute, he integrates multimodal AI with practical systems, addressing security and privacy challenges in visual media and multimedia AI applications.
Outstanding Scientist: Qiang Yang
Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), China
Award Citation: Professor Yang is a world-renowned authority on transfer learning and federated learning. He pioneered methods enabling AI models to learn across domains and decentralized data sources while preserving privacy. His research spans transfer learning, automated planning, and federated learning. As a global leader and editor of major journals, his work establishes foundational frameworks for collaborative, cross-domain machine learning in both academia and industry.
Warm congratulations to all professors who have been awarded the NAAI Outstanding Scientist Award. This honor is a high recognition of your outstanding achievements in basic research and application innovation in your respective fields, indicating that your scientific research has received widespread acclaim from international peers. We extend our highest respect to all of you for your remarkable achievements!