Ji-Rong Wen

Also known as Jirong Wen, Wen Jirong, 文继荣

Ji-Rong Wen is a computer scientist who ran a web search and mining group at Microsoft Research Asia and later led big data and AI research at Renmin University of China. He studied at Renmin University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, earned his Ph.D. in 1999, and worked at Microsoft Research Asia from 1999 until he returned to Renmin in 2013, when he was elected a National Distinguished Professor. In 2019, he became executive dean of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, and by 2021 he led a team at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence working on a language model similar to GPT-3. He was a program chair of SIGIR 2020 and coauthored A Survey of Large Language Models in 2023 and the LLaDA diffusion language model paper in 2025. As of October 2026, he is executive dean of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence.

Now at: Renmin University of China
Badges: Bridge
Boomerang

Timeline

1990–1999

Renmin University and a CAS doctorate

He studies at the School of Information of Renmin University of China, as an undergraduate from 1990 to 1994 and a master's student from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
1999–2013

14 years at Microsoft Research Asia

He completes his Ph.D. and joins Microsoft Research Asia in 1999, where he works for 14 years as a senior researcher and group manager of the Web Search and Mining Group. The team he leads develops Microsoft Academic Search, People Cube and Product Search, and he earns over 50 U.S. patents.
2013–2018

Professor and dean at Renmin

In 2013, he returns to Renmin University of China as a professor in the School of Information to lead big data and AI research, and he is elected a National Distinguished Professor. He becomes dean of the School of Information in 2016, and in 2018 he is elected Beijing's Distinguished Young Scientist.
2019

Executive dean at Gaoling

In 2019, he becomes tenured professor and executive dean of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China. His team builds an open-source technology ecosystem in AI infrastructure and takes on national and Beijing municipal research projects.
2020

Program chair of SIGIR 2020

He is one of the three program chairs of SIGIR 2020, the 43rd ACM SIGIR conference, together with Jaap Kamps and Vanessa Murdock.
By 2021

A GPT-3-like model at BAAI

By January 2021, he leads a team at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), where he works part-time, testing a language algorithm similar to GPT-3. He plans to combine machine learning with databases of facts and to feed the algorithm images and video along with text. He is also chief scientist of BAAI.
2023–2025

The LLM survey and LLaDA

In 2023, he is a coauthor, with Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-Yun Nie and others, of A Survey of Large Language Models, which reviews pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization and capacity evaluation of LLMs. In 2025, he is a coauthor of LLaDA, a diffusion language model trained from scratch whose 8B version is competitive with LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning.
As of October 2026

Gaoling School and computing power

He is executive dean of the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China. In April 2026, he speaks at the signing of the University and College Computing Power Support Program between the school and Yingbo Digital Technology, arranged through the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and stresses the role of high-level intelligent computing infrastructure in research breakthroughs and talent training.