Taipei, TAIWAN- November 10 , 2020 – Appier , a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, today announces the first recipient of its ‘Appier AI Chair Professor Program’. In order to reward outstanding AI experts and facilitate research development, Appier takes the lead to donate the ‘Appier AI Chair Professor Program’ to the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of National Taiwan University (NTU).

The recipient of the first year’s award is Dr. Yung-Yu Chuang, a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering (CSIE) at NTU. Appier has long been committed to supporting the development of AI talent in Taiwan. The company believes in effective collaboration between industry and academia can advance the adoption of AI technology in business and society, and the AI Chair Professor program is designed to support academic education and industry forefront research in artificial intelligence.

Dr. Chuang has been teaching in the Department of CSIE at NTU since 2004 and served as the head of the Department of CSIE at NTU from 2017 to 2020. He specializes in computer vision, computer graphics, more specifically computational photography, stereoscopic media processing, and rendering. In the past few years, he has published nearly 20 papers at top international conferences on AI and computer vision and has won a number of research and teaching awards. 

Dr. Chuang is one of several industry-sponsored Chair Professors, all recognized as world-renowned experts and outstanding educators, and Appier’s program is the first one dedicated to artificial intelligence. During the sponsorship period, Dr. Chuang will focus on driving the most impactful AI research to benefit business, academia, and society at large. His research topics include using deep learning to reduce annotation costs, developing compact deep learning models, and leveraging deep learning to improve image quality. 

“I am honored to be appointed as Appier’s AI Chair Professor,” said Dr. Chuang. “I have long admired Appier’s commitment to AI innovation and applying the most cutting-edge technology to solve business problems. With Appier’s support of this program, I can focus on leading long-term critical AI research and help to better connect academic discoveries and real-world applications.” In addition to a B.S. degree and an M.S. degree in Computer Science & Information Engineering from National Taiwan University, Dr. Chuang also holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.