Biography
Dr. Min Zhang, a distinguished professor and Director of the Research Institute of Intelligent Computing at Soochow University (China), received his Bachelor degree and Ph.D. degree in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1997, respectively. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. He began his academic and industrial career as a researcher at Lernout & Hauspie Asia Pacific (Singapore) in September 1999. He joined Infotalk Technology (Singapore) as a researcher in 2001 and became a senior research manager in 2002. He joined the Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore) as a research scientist in December 2003. He built up the statistical machine translation (SMT) team in the institute in 2007 and managed the SMT research and development activities in the institute until 2013. He joined Soochow University in 2012 and set up the Research Institute of Intelligent Computing in the university in 2013.
His current research interests include machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, social network computing, Internet intelligence, intelligent computing and machine learning. He has co-authored more than 130 papers in leading journals and conferences, and co-edited 10 books published by Springer and IEEE. He has been actively contributing to the research community by organizing many conferences as conference chairs, program chairs and organizing chairs, and giving talks at many conferences and lectures. He was the recipient of several awards in China and oversea, including the “2013 Shuang Chuang Program (1000 Talent Program of Jiangsu Province)”, the 2nd prize of the Ministry of Aerospace of China in 1995 and 1997, the 2008/2009 research achiever of the Institute for Infocomm Research and the 2002 National Infocomm Award (group) at Singapore. He is the vice president of COLIPS (2011-2013), a steering committee member of PACLIC (2011~ now), an executive member of AFNLP (2013~ 2014) and a member of ACL (2006~). He supervises Ph.D students at National University of Singapore, Harbin Institute of Technology and Soochow University.
Memo
His baby girls bring him more than joy and fun since they came to the world in 2006 and 2011, respectively. He plays outside with her baby girls at least one hour per day in weekday and two full days in weekend. He never teaches his babies, but he is writing/editing a book for Chinese baby. His spare time was mostly occupied by TV and Internet, but now is fully occupied by his baby girls. He likes travelling and reading books on history, culture, geography, philosophy and politics very much. He has a dream to write a book to describe/study how human being looks like from the viewpoints of animals or more advanced species than human being. He has broad research interests in his research fields and was complained of being very demanding in working to his surrounding talented colleagues, excellent students and himself. He likes sequential modeling issues. But he has much greater passion for structure modeling and particularly curious of how and when a machine is able to translate one natural sentence into another language elegantl y. He has been enjoying all the challenges in developing such technologies and realizing such real systems among any language pairs.
He has another thing to pursuit with great effort and feels very puzzled recently. However, this is his secret. You can drop him an email if you want to know.
Education
- Ph.D(1997), Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
- Master(1994), Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
- Bachelor(1991), Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Working Experiences
Distinguished Professor, Dean of the School of CS and Software (2013.10 ~ Present)
Soochow University, ChinaResearch Staff, Head of Statistical Machine Translation Lab, (2003.12 ~ 2013.10)
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A-STAR, SingaporeResearch Staff, Senior Research Manager (2001.01 ~ 2003.11)
Infotalk Technology Pte. Ltd., SingaporeResearch Staff (1999.09 ~ 2001.01)
Lernout & Hauspie Asian Pacific, SingaporePostdoctoral Researcher (1997.12 ~ 1999.09)
Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea
Adjunct Positions
Adjunct Professor, Ph.D Supervisor (2005.10 ~ Present)
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, ChinaAdjunct Ph.D Co-Supervisor (2007.01 ~ Present)
Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A-STAR) and National University of Singapore (NUS), SingaporeAdjunct Chair Professor (2009.06 ~ Present)
Department of Computer Science, Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, ChinaAdjunct Chair Professors (2010.01 ~ 2012.10)
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Soochow University, China