PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Eric Chi Lik Lo

Also known as Eric Lo, Chi Lik Eric Lo

Eric Chi Lik Lo is a computer scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong whose work joins database systems with deep video analytics and other AI workloads. He earned a doctorate at ETH Zurich in 2007 and, by 2014, directed the Big Data Lab at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. In 2020 he became a principal investigator at CUHK's Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence and coauthored Everest, a system for Top-K video analytics. His Dash paper won the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award in 2021, and Everest won the best demonstration runner-up award at ACM SIGMOD 2022. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK and Program Committee Chair of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing.

Timeline

  1. 2007

    Doctorate at ETH Zurich

    He earns a D.Sc. from ETH Zurich in 2007 under Donald Kossmann, with a dissertation titled 'Test Automation for Database Management Systems and Database Applications'. A member of ETH's Systems group, he studies with support from the Croucher Scholarship.

  2. By 2014

    Big Data Lab at PolyU

    By 2014, he is an associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Department of Computing and director of its Big Data Lab, after time at Google in Mountain View. Three of his research papers have won best paper awards, and he serves on program committees for the major database conferences.

  3. 2020

    Principal investigator at CPII

    CUHK establishes the Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence in 2020 under the InnoHK initiative of the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong government. He becomes a principal investigator of the centre, with research focused on video analytics, supercomputing, databases, distributed systems and data science.

  4. March 2020

    Everest for Top-K video analytics

    In March 2020, he and coauthors Ziliang Lai, Chenxia Han, Chris Liu, Pengfei Zhang and Ben Kao post 'Top-K Deep Video Analytics: A Probabilistic Approach' on arXiv. The paper presents Everest, a system that ranks the most interesting frames of videos with probabilistic guarantees and reports 14.3x to 20.6x higher efficiency than baseline approaches.

  5. 2021

    A SIGMOD Research Highlight Award

    His VLDB 2020 paper 'Dash: Scalable Hashing on Persistent Memory', written with three coauthors, earns the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award in 2021.

  6. June 2022

    Everest wins at SIGMOD 2022

    In June 2022, he and his team win the best demonstration runner-up award at ACM SIGMOD 2022 with 'Everest: A Top-K Deep Video Analytics System'. The demo returns the highest-scored frames or short clips of an uploaded video, and users can add new deep models as user-defined functions.

  7. 2025

    Bobsled for video streams

    At SIGMOD 2025, he coauthors Bobsled, a video stream processing system for complex event queries that reaches 2.4x to 11.6x the throughput of state-of-the-art systems with no noticeable loss in accuracy. At ICCV 2025, he also coauthors Magic Mirror, a paper with Jiaya Jia and other coauthors on ID-preserved video generation in video diffusion transformers.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate Professor at CUHK

    As of October 2026, he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK, with research interests in AI systems, supercomputing, databases, distributed systems and AI for science. He serves as Program Committee Chair of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, which meets in Singapore in November 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2020Chinese University of Hong KongPrincipal investigator
  2. Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityAssociate professor

Education

  1. 2007ETH ZurichD.Sc.

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Eric Chi Lik Lo. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes Chinese University of Hong Kong. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  4. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Chinese University of Hong Kong. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Chi Lo - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Prof. Chi Lik Eric LO – Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence (CPII) cpii.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Mr. Eric Lo hkcs.org.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2003.00773] Top-K Deep Video Analytics: A Probabilistic Approach arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Research | Eric Lo's Homepage appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Prof. Lo and His Team Won the Best Demonstration Runner Up Award at ACM SIGMOD 2022 – CUHK CSE cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Selected Publications | Eric Lo's Homepage appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Eric Chi Lik Lo – CUHK CSE cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. 2026 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing acmsocc.org. Checked 21 October 2026.