Harry Shum was executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group until March 1, 2020. He was responsible for driving the company’s overall AI strategy and forward-looking research and development efforts spanning infrastructure, services, apps and agents. He oversaw AI-focused product groups including Bing. He also led Microsoft Research, one of the world’s premier computer science research organizations, and its integration with the engineering teams across the company.

Previously, Dr. Shum served as the corporate vice president responsible for Bing search product development from 2007 to 2013. Prior to his engineering leadership role at Bing and online services, he oversaw the research activities at Microsoft Research Asia and the lab’s collaborations with universities in the Asia Pacific region, and was responsible for the Internet Services Research Center, an applied research organization dedicated to advanced technology investment in search and advertising at Microsoft.

Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 as a researcher based in Redmond, Washington. In 1998 he moved to Beijing as one of the founding members of Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). There he began a nine-year tenure as a researcher, subsequently moving on to become research manager, assistant managing director and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and a Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. Shum is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2017 and 2018, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering of the United States, and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom, respectively. He is the founding chairman of International Digital Economy Academy.