Professional short bio:

Eric P. Xing is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Petuum Inc., a 2018 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer company that builds standardized artificial intelligence development platform and operating system for broad and general industrial AI applications. He completed his undergraduate study at Tsinghua University, and holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the Rutgers University, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architectures, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in artificial, biological, and social systems. Prof. Xing currently serves or has served the following roles: associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), Annals of Applied Statistics (AOAS), IEEE Journal of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology; action editor of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) and Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR); member of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) advisory group. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award, as well as several best paper awards. Prof Xing is a board member of the International Machine Learning Society; he has served as the Program Chair (2014) and General Chair (2019) of the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML); he is also the Associate Department Head of the Machine Learning Department, founding director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University; he is a Fellow of AAAI, IEEE, and ASA.

A little more about me:

I was born in Shanghai, China and spent my childhood there. After completing a B.S. degree major in Physics and minor in Biology in Tsinghua University, Beijing, I came to the United States and studied the genetic mechanisms of human carcinogenesis at Rutgers University, New Jersey, under Professor Chung S. Yang and obtained my first Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Not totally satisfied with the extend and nature of understanding of biological phenomena I could reach via pure experimental approaches, I moved on and turned to statistical machine learning, and completed a second Ph.D. in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley, under Professors Michael Jordan, Richard Karp, and Stuart Russell. I joined the faculty of CS@CMU in 2004, where I have been directing the SAILING Lab whose research spans a broad spectrum of topics ranging from theoretical foundations to real-world applications in machine learning, distributed systems, computer vision, natural language processing, and computational biology. I was awarded early-tenure in 2011 (two years ahead of clock), and was named a full professor in 2014. In 2016, I founded Petuum Inc. to pursue standardization and industrialization of general-purpose AI platform and building blocks. Petuum was recognized as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2018.