Hang Li is Chief Scientist and Distinguished Visiting Professor at AIR. He is an ACM Fellow, ACL Fellow, IEEE Fellow,and CCF Distinguished Member. His research areas include machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and data mining.
Hang Li graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Kyoto University, Japan, in 1988 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1998. He worked as a researcher at the Central Research Laboratory of NEC Corporation, Japan, from 1990 to 2001. From 2001 to 2012, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia, serving as a Senior Researcher and Research Manager. From 2012 to 2017, he served as Chief Scientist and Director at the Noah's Ark Laboratory of Huawei Technologies. He joined ByteDance in 2017 and worked as the Director of the AI Lab and Head of Research. He lead the Seed Robotics, Seed AI for Science, and Seed Responsible AI teams.
Hang Li has been active in these research areas for many years. He has published nine academic monographs and textbooks in Chinese and English. His textbook entitled Machine Learning Methods (previously Statistical Learning Methods) has sold over 360,000 copies, and is widely known as the "Blue Bible" of machine learning in China. He has published over 160 research papers in top-tier international conferences and journals, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL, EMNLP , NeurIPS, ICML, SIGKDD, AAAI, and IJCAI, as well as journals such as CL, NLE, JMLR, TOIS, IRJ, IPM, TKDE, TWEB, TIST, and JCST. His co-authored paper won the KDD 2008 Best Application Paper Award, and students he advised received the SIGIR 2008 Best Student Paper Award and the ACL 2012 Best Student Paper Award. In 2023, he received the ACM-CCF AI Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence. He has over 37,000 paper citations and his H-index is 87.
Hang Li has participated in the development of multiple products, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Bing, Huawei smartphones, Huawei AppGallery, the Toutiao news platform, ByteDance Lark, ByteDance Education, ByteDance Seed Video Generation, and ByteDance Seed Speech Translation. He holds over 60 granted U.S. patents.
Hang Li has also served in important roles at leading international conferences and journals, including Program Committee Chair, Area Chair, Senior Program Committee Member, and Program Committee Member for conferences such as SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP , NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGKDD, ICDM, ACML, and IJCAI. He has also served as an Editorial Board Member for journals including CL, IRJ, TIST, JASIST, JCST, TOIS, CSL, and TACL. For example, he was program co-chair of EMNLP 2010 and SIGIR 2017. He was the president of ACL SIGDAT in 2022.
