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YingLi Tian, Ph.D.

CUNY Distinguished Professor

Department of Electrical Engineering
The City College

Short Biography:

Dr. YingLi Tian is CUNY Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY) and Computer Science at Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She received her PhD from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996. Her research interests include computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, assistive technology, medical imaging analysis, and remote sensing. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences in these areas, and holds 29 issued patents. Her research has been supported by NSF, NIH, ONR, DHS, FHWA, ARO, CUNY, CCNY, as well as industry sponsors.

She is a pioneer in automatic facial expression analysis, human activity understanding, and assistive technology. Dr. Tian’s research on automatic facial expression analysis and database development while working at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has made significant impact in the research community and received the “Test of Time Award” at IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2019. Before joining CCNY, Dr. Tian was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and led the video analytics team. She received the IBM Outstanding Innovation Achievement Award in 2007 and the IBM Invention Achievement Awards every year from 2002 to 2007. Since Dr. Tian joined CCNY in Fall 2008, she has been focusing on assistive technology by applying computer vision and machine learning technologies to help people with special needs including the blind and visually impaired, deaf and hard-of-hearing, and the elderly. She serves as associate editors for IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (TMM), Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU), Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (JVCI), and Machine Vision and Applications.