Our Leadership Team

Dr Emily Ding is a co-founder and the head of Vineyards AI Lab. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and completed post-doctoral work there. She has extensive experience in teaching and research, having served as a research scientist, senior visiting scholar, and research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Massey University, and the University of Otago. Over the past 15 years, Dr Emily Ding has focused on AI product development and model evolution to address various real-world problems and applications. Her work has resulted in numerous recognised academic outcomes, including academic papers, patents, and software copyrights.

As the current head of Vineyards AI Lab, Dr Emily Ding is developing a holographic mode for AI that integrates research, solutions, and education to facilitate mutual enhancement across industry and academic fields. In the realm of education, Dr Emily Ding concentrates on cutting-edge AI, signal processing, and electronic engineering knowledge tailored to the younger generation to prepare them for the upcoming AI era. She guides teenagers in learning classic models and encourages them to propose innovative solutions to societal issues of interest. Consequently, her students have published their work in international journals and conferences and have been invited to present their findings at international AI conferences. Moreover, the apps they have developed (demos) have piqued the interest of industry experts and attracted investments.

Dr Hou earned his PhD from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His doctoral research focused on large-scale deep transfer learning and domain adaptation in computer vision, which is an exciting and critical topic in AI. Additionally, he holds a background in electronics engineering and physics (B.Eng) and signal processing (M.Eng, research on ICA). Throughout his career, he has held various roles and contributed to projects in academia and industries, working on models and hardware in AI, particularly for computer vision and NLP applications. These diverse experiences have shaped him into both a scientist and a practitioner in AI (he jokingly refers to himself as a 'scigineer' = scientist + engineer 😂). His research has been published in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and the innovative models he has designed are deployed in large-scale industrial applications to serve global customers. In his spare time, he enjoys sports, reading, and cooking.