PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Qi Chen

Qi Chen is a systems researcher at Microsoft Research Asia whose work covers distributed systems and vector search for AI. With a B.S. in 2010 and a Ph.D. in 2016 from Peking University, Chen joined Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing in 2016. A best paper at OSDI 2020 on the Pompe protocol came first, followed by SPANN, a billion-scale nearest-neighbor search system accepted at NeurIPS 2021, and A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval, a NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper. Since December 2023, they are a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia Vancouver, and in 2024 they coauthored RetrievalAttention for long-context LLM inference.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2006–2016

    Degrees from Peking University

    Chen earns a B.S. in computer science at Peking University in 2010 and a Ph.D. there in 2016 under Zhen Xiao. From 2013 to 2014, they spend time as a visiting student in Jinyang Li's System Group at New York University.

  2. 2016–2023

    Joining Microsoft Research Asia

    In July 2016, Chen starts at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, and works in its System Research Group. Through 2023, the roles run from researcher to senior researcher to principal researcher.

  3. 2020

    OSDI best paper on Pompe

    In 2020, they coauthor "Byzantine Ordered Consensus without Byzantine Oligarchy" with Yunhao Zhang, Srinath Setty, Lidong Zhou and Lorenzo Alvisi. The OSDI paper introduces Pompe, a protocol for Byzantine fault tolerant state machine replication, and wins the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award.

  4. 2021

    SPANN for billion-scale search

    In 2021, Chen is first author of SPANN, a memory-disk hybrid system for approximate nearest neighbor search, with coauthors including Mao Yang and Jingdong Wang. SPANN is accepted at NeurIPS 2021 and reaches 90% recall 2× faster than DiskANN on three billion-scale datasets.

  5. 2022

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

    In 2022, they are among the authors of "A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval" with Yujing Wang, Qi Zhang, Mao Yang and others. NeurIPS names it an Outstanding Paper; its Neural Corpus Indexer is a sequence-to-sequence network that generates relevant document identifiers directly for a query.

  6. 2023

    SPFresh vector index updates

    In 2023, SPFresh, a system that supports in-place vector updates for billion-scale vector search, is accepted at SOSP 2023 with Chen among its authors.

  7. Since December 2023

    Principal Researcher in Vancouver

    In December 2023, they become a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia Vancouver. In 2024, they coauthor RetrievalAttention, which builds approximate nearest neighbor indexes for key-value vectors in CPU memory to speed up long-context LLM inference.

Career

  1. Since 2016Microsoft Research AsiaResearcher; Senior Researcher; Principal Researcher, Principal Researcher
  2. 2013–2014New York UniversityVisiting student

Education

  1. 2016Peking UniversityB.S.; Ph.D.

From the biography.

  1. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Microsoft. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. 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.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Microsoft. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Microsoft. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Qi Chen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Qi Chen's Homepage maggieqi.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Qi Chen at Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Byzantine Ordered Consensus without Byzantine Oligarchy | USENIX usenix.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. SPANN: Highly-efficient Billion-scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS Poster A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. NeurIPS 2022 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. SPFresh: Incremental In-Place Update for Billion-Scale Vector Search arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. RetrievalAttention: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Vector Retrieval arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.