Yong Rui

2020 Distinguished Alumni Award

For significant contributions in the fields of AI and multimedia analysis, corporate leadership, and widely-cited scientific publications.

Dr. Yong Rui is the Corporate CTO and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group.  He directs Lenovo’s technical strategies and R&D directions. Additionally, Dr. Rui leads  the Lenovo Research organization that investigates intelligent devices, artificial intelligence, 5G, cloud and edge computing, and smart vertical solutions.  

Prior to joining Lenovo, Dr. Rui spent 18 years with Microsoft where he held various leadership roles in R&D strategy, basic research, technology incubation and product development, and most recently served as Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia. 

Dr. Rui has extensive R&D leadership experience and has delivered numerous technologies and products. At Lenovo, Dr. Rui is one of the key drivers of the 3S (Smart IoT, Smart Infrastructure and Smart Verticals) strategy, which is transforming Lenovo into a leader and enabler of the intelligence era.  Under his leadership, the R&D teams have developed Lenovo AI Platform, Lenovo ThinkCloud, Lenovo AI call center agents, Lenovo Supply Chain Intelligence, AR technologies daystAR, and Lenovo Cashier-less Store Solutions.  At Microsoft, Dr. Rui and his team have developed technologies used by millions of users around the world, including Microsoft Bing Search (image search, video search and entity search), Microsoft XiaoIce, Microsoft Satori (entity graph), Microsoft Office (RoundTable, OneNote and Sway), Microsoft OneDrive (photo tagging), Microsoft Hololens (3D reconstruction), and Microsoft Cognitive Services on Azure (face, image and video analysis).

A Fellow of ACM, IEEE, IAPR and SPIE, and a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and Canadian Academy of Engineering, Dr. Rui is world-renowned technologist.  He holds 70 patents, and is the recipient of the prestigious 2018 ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award and 2016 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award. 

Dr. Rui received his BS from Southeast University Summa cum laude, his MS from Tsinghua University, and his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).   

Current as of 2020.