PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Heng Tao Shen

Also known as 申恒涛, Hengtao Shen

Heng Tao Shen is a computer scientist whose AI research centers on large-scale multimedia content understanding, indexing and retrieval. After earning his degrees at the National University of Singapore, he spent 2004 to 2017 at the University of Queensland, where he presented UQLIPS, a real-time system for detecting near-duplicate video clips, in 2007 and became a professor in late 2011. His surveys of hashing for similarity search, written with Jingdong Wang and others in 2014 and 2016, classify the hashing methods used for nearest-neighbor search. At UESTC in Chengdu, he became dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering in 2017, and ACM, IEEE and OSA named him a Fellow before Academia Europaea elected him in 2022. He works at Tongji University, where he coauthored a SIGMOD 2026 paper on merging graph indexes for nearest-neighbor search, and he sits on the editorial board of CAAI Transactions on Intelligent Systems.

Timeline

  1. 2000–2004

    Computer science at NUS

    He earns a first-class honours BSc in 2000 and a PhD in 2004 from the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He completes the doctorate as a student of Ooi Beng Chin in the NUS Database System Group.

  2. 2004–2017

    Professor at Queensland

    He joins the University of Queensland as a lecturer in 2004 and moves up through senior lecturer and reader to become a professor in late 2011. He receives the CORE Australasia Chris Wallace Award for outstanding research contributions in 2010 and an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2012. He holds the professorship in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering until 2017, when Queensland names him an honorary professor.

  3. 2007

    The UQLIPS video detection system

    In 2007, he presents UQLIPS at VLDB with Xiaofang Zhou, Zi Huang, Jie Shao and Xiangmin Zhou; the real-time system identifies and retrieves near-duplicate video clips.

  4. 2014

    Specially appointed professor at UESTC

    From January to June 2014, he is a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at NUS. He begins working in Sichuan in 2014 as a specially appointed professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in Chengdu.

  5. 2014–2016

    Surveys of hashing for search

    With Jingdong Wang, Jingkuan Song and Jianqiu Ji, he coauthors "Hashing for Similarity Search: A Survey" in 2014, which divides hashing methods into locality sensitive hashing and learning to hash. In 2016, he joins Wang, Ting Zhang, Song and Nicu Sebe on "A Survey on Learning to Hash" for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, which finds that quantization methods perform best in search accuracy, search time and space cost.

  6. 2017–2020

    Dean of computing at UESTC

    In February 2017, he becomes a distinguished professor and dean of UESTC's School of Computer Science and Engineering, and he also serves as executive dean of its AI Research Institute and dean of the Sichuan AI Research Institute. Sichuan gives him its 2017 Tianfu Friendship Award, the province's highest honour for foreign experts, and Peng Cheng Laboratory names him chief scientist of vision intelligence in May 2020. He receives best paper awards at ACM Multimedia 2017 and from IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 2020.

  7. 2019–2022

    ACM and IEEE fellowships

    OSA names him a Fellow in 2019, ACM names him a 2020 Fellow for contributions to large-scale multimedia content understanding, indexing and retrieval, and IEEE elevates him to Fellow in 2021. He is general co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2021. Academia Europaea elects him a foreign member of its informatics section in 2022.

  8. As of October 2026

    Researcher at Tongji University

    In 2026, as a Tongji University researcher, he coauthors FGIM, a fast framework for merging graph-based indexes for approximate nearest neighbor search, accepted at SIGMOD. As of October 2026, he works at Tongji University and serves on the editorial board of CAAI Transactions on Intelligent Systems.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

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. Academy of Europe: CV ae-info.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Lab Alumnus Elected Fellow of the ACM – DB System News comp.nus.edu.sg. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Academy of Europe: Shen Heng Tao ae-info.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. DBLP: Heng Tao Shen vldb.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. 5名外国专家获“天府友谊奖”，在医学电子教育等领域贡献大|川观新闻 cbgc.scol.com.cn. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Professor Shen Hengtao from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China is elected a new member of Academia Europaea 2022 laoyaoba.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. [1408.2927] Hashing for Similarity Search: A Survey arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. [1606.00185] A Survey on Learning to Hash arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. The 2026 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference: Bengaluru, India - Accepted Papers for SIGMOD 2026.sigmod.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. Editorial Board Members -CAAI transactions on intelligent systems tis.hrbeu.edu.cn. Checked 19 October 2026.