Yong Rui knows how many mobile phone users there are in China (nearly twice the U.S. population) and when the Chinese will overtake Americans as the most frequent users of the Internet (next year).
As technical assistant to Microsoft's top boss in the company's China R&D Group, Rui knows where China has been and where it is in terms of technology development. Since January of this year, Rui now has a say in where some of that development is headed.
Rui grew up in China, graduated from its top engineering college, and studied computer vision at the Beckman Institute from one of the field's pioneers, Human- Computer Intelligent Interaction Co-chair Thomas Huang. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 1998, Rui joined Microsoft Research and subsequently became head of the Multimedia Collaboration team at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
During those same years, Microsoft was building its presence in China. After starting a sales office and a research and development center there in the 1990s, the software giant launched Microsoft Research China, later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, in 1998. Other research and technology development centers followed until the company decided to establish an umbrella organization in 2006 called the Microsoft China Research and Development Group. Microsoft chose Corporate Vice-President Ya-Qin Zhang to be president of this new group, with Rui serving as Zhang's top technical adviser.
The group's purpose, says Rui, is to guide Microsoft's research and development directions in China. The group will explore new research lines for Microsoft applications while also developing products geared toward China's burgeoning consumer base.
China's stunningly rapid emergence as a major player on the world's economic stage is having a huge impact on everything from manufacturing to technology, and Microsoft plans on being a part of it. Rui's responsibility, he said, is “to help the president define and drive the overall R&D strategy in China.”
That's a big task, but one for which Rui is uniquely qualified. The knowledge Rui gained at Beckman and UIUC in computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning, he applied to developing communication and multimedia systems at Microsoft. Over the years he has published research papers and book chapters with Huang and many others, remaining in the forefront of image and signal processing and multimedia issues.
Rui's focus for his Ph.D was on image retrieval, and it turned out to be the first of several smart choices. Rui found himself in a perfect position while working toward his doctorate when UIUC was selected as one of five universities to take part in a seminal government-sponsored digital library project.
“I was very lucky,” he said. “I was Tom's first student who was doing research in this particular area, because it was very, very new. A new field can be both good and bad — good in the sense that if you discover something, then wow, you can really make a big impact. The not so good part is you don't have much to learn from because it is so new. I was lucky in the sense that I actually discovered something in the field.”
Rui's contribution was relevant feedback, which uses algorithms for image retrieval that work like a text search on Internet search engines. It dovetailed nicely with the digital library project.
“I was lucky in that I entered this field at the right time and I introduced this technology,” Rui said. “Now it's pretty much everywhere. This by itself is already a research direction in the multimedia research community. So I'm very happy and proud that I did something in that field.”