Dr. Nicholas (Jing) Yuan is President of the Haier Global AI Research Institute (HARI) and a Vice President at Haier. He oversees frontier AI research and AI-driven industrial innovation at Haier, leading a global team with a current focus on home intelligence and physical AI. He is also driving the Group’s AI-native transformation across its diverse businesses. Nicholas is an Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Throughout his career, he has worked across AI research, product development, and commercialization, translating research advances into real-world applications.
Before joining Haier, Nicholas was a Partner at Microsoft and Technical Advisor to the Corporate Vice President (CVP), responsible for strategy development and long-range technology planning, as well as technology and product incubation. Previously, he was Vice President of AI, Chief Scientist, and Director of the Language & Speech Innovation Lab at Huawei Cloud, where he directed the development and commercialization of AI and big data technologies across sectors including smart cities, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and energy. Before that, he served as Deputy General Manager of the AI Creation Business Team and as a Senior Applied Scientist Lead/Manager at Microsoft. During this time, he spearheaded the development of Microsoft Xiaoice’s AI-generated content technologies and a portfolio of AIGC products, including the “Image-Inspired Poetry” system. He also led Bing’s knowledge graph efforts in Asia-Pacific. Earlier in his career, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. Nicholas holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, both from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Over the years, Nicholas has published more than 100 papers at leading international conferences, including KDD, UbiComp, ACL, WWW, ICDE, and AAAI, and in journals such as TKDE and TOIS. He has regularly served as a program committee member or chair for leading international conferences, as well as a reviewer for top journals in the fields of data mining and AI. His research has been featured multiple times by influential media outlets such as MIT Technology Review. In 2021, he was recognized as one of the most influential scholars in data mining by AMiner AI 2000, ranking No. 12 worldwide and No. 2 in mainland China. Nicholas has received numerous honors, including the Microsoft Fellowship (2011), the Best Paper Award at ICDM (2013), and the Best Student Paper Awards at KDD (2016, 2018) and CVPR (2026). He also received the Best Paper Runner-up Award at SIGSPATIAL (2010) and the Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2013). In 2018, he was awarded the First-Class Prize of the Natural Science Award from China’s Ministry of Education. Additionally, he earned the 10-Year Impact Honorable Mention at SIGSPATIAL (2020), the Test-of-Time Award at KDD (2022), and the Test-of-Time Award at MDM (2023). Nicholas is a Fellow of the IEEE.