Edward Y. Chang

Edward Chang has acted as the Vice President of Research and Innovation at HTC since July 2012, heading software and hardware future technology research and development. Besides having developed and launched competitive camera features (e.g., 360-degree Panoramas, Duo Lens with 3D effects, and Cloud Gallery with content-based image retrieval) for flagship phones, Ed's most notable project is the Tricorder project, which he co-leads (with Prof. CK Peng at Harvard) a team of physicians, scientists, and engineers to design and develop mobile wireless diagnostic instruments that can help consumers make their own reliable health diagnoses anywhere at anytime. The project entered the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition in 2013 with 254 other entrants and was selected as one of the ten finalists in August 2014 to advance to the final round (grand prizes to be announced in January 2016).

Prior to his HTC post, Ed was a director of Google Research for 6.5 years, leading research and development in several areas including big data mining, indoor localization, social networking and search integration, and Web search (spam fighting). His contributions in parallel machine learning algorithms and big-data mining are recognized through several keynote invitations (see Stanford MMDS/ACM CIKM/ACM CIVR/ACM MM/AAIM/ADMA keynote deck and tutorial deck for details), and the developed open-source codes (PSVM, PLDA+, Parallel Spectral Clustering, and Parallel Frequent Pattern Mining) have been collectively downloaded over 10,000 times. His work on indoor localization with project X was deployed via Google Maps (see XINX paper and the editor summary of his ASIST/ACM SIGIR/ICADL keynotes). Ed's team also developed the Google Q&A system (codename Confucius), which was launched in 60+ countries including China, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as 17 Arab and 40 African nations. Ed's book titled Foundations of Large-Scale Multimedia Information Management and Retrieval provides a good summary of his experience in applying big data techniques to feature extraction, learning, and indexing for organizing multimedia data to support both management and retrieval.

Prior to Google, Ed was a full professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He joined UCSB in 1999 after receiving his PhD from Stanford University, and was tenured in 2003 and promoted to full professor in 2006. Ed has served on ACM (SIGMOD, KDD, MM, CIKM), VLDB, IEEE, WWW, and SIAM conference program committees, and co-chaired several conferences including MMM, ACM MM, ICDE, and WWW. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, IBM Faculty Partnership Award, and Google Innovation Award.