Brief Biography

Dr. Steve Liu is a Full Professor in the School of Computer Science and a William Dawson Scholar (Chair Professor) at McGill University. He is Vice President R&D, Chief Scientist, and Co-Director of the Samsung AI Center Montreal. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (FCAE), IEEE Fellow (FIEEE), and ACM Distinghuished Member. He is the current Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Embedded Systems (SIGBED). He is also a Professor (by courtesy appointment) of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University. Dr. Liu is a faculty and associate member of Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He served as the Chief Scientist of Tinder Inc. from 2016 to 2019, leading the research and innovations for the world's largest dating and social discovery app, which is now valued over 20 Billion US$.

At McGill University, Dr. Liu is also an associated member of the Center for Intelligent Machines (CIM). He is a recipient of several awards including the Mitacs Award for Exceptional Leadership -- Professor; the Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prizes from the Canadian Association of Computer Science; and the Tomlinson Scientist Award for "recognition of excellence and scientific leadership" at McGill University. He is the founding director of the Cyber-Physical Intelligence Lab at McGill University since 2007. He also worked briefly as the Samuel R. Thompson Chair Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York.

Dr. Liu obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science with multiple distinctions from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his B.S. degree in Mathematics and Master's degree in Automation and Control Theory both from Tsinghua University. Dr. Liu received the Ray Ozzie Fellowship, the Saburo Muroga Fellowship, the Mavis Memorial Fund Award (for being "the best graduate students in the College of Engineering who demonstrate excellence in research, teaching, and service") , and the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award (for being "the best graduate student in the Department of Computer Science") from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published over 380 research papers in major highly-reputable peer-reviewed International academic journals and conference proceedings, including NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, WWW, IEEE ICRA, IEEE/RSJ IROS, ACM SIGIR, ACM WSDM, ACM MobiCom, ACM KDD, ACM Multimedia, ACM UbiComp, ACM SoCC, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNP, IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland), IEEE RTSS, IEEE RTAS, ACM/IEEE ICCPS, IEEE ICDE etc, and various IEEE and ACM Transactions. He has also authored/co-authors 5 books/monographs and several book chapters. His research received several best paper awards from IEEE and ACM.

Dr. Liu is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the IEEE, a distinguished member of the ACM, and a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honorary Society. Dr. Liu's research has been supported by NSERC Discovery Grants, NSERC Strategic Grant, NSERC CRD Grants, Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), US National Science Foundation (NSF), Quebec Fund for Research on Nature and Technology (FQRNT) New Researcher Award, Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems(MITACS), CRIAQ, MDEIE, and several research labs and companies including Amazon, Bell Canada, Bombardier, Thales, General Motors, HP Labs. Dr. Liu's research has been reported by news media including the New York Times, CBC, Huffington Post, Computer World/IDG, Business Insider, The Register, NewScientist, MIT Technology Review's Blog, and McGill Daily, etc, and other major online news forums including Slashdot, Yahoo news, etc.

Dr. Liu has served on the organizing committees of over 40 major international conferences and workshops including ACM/IEEE CPSWeek, INFOCOM, RTSS, RTAS, SenSys, ICDCS, IWQoS, and received several outstanding service awards. He has also served as program committee members for over 100 international conferences and workshops. Dr. Liu is or had been an editor/associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS) , IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial (COMST), and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). Dr. Liu served on various national and international grant review committees or panels.

Dr. Liu is also an avid entrepreneur and industrial practitioner. His research and inventions have been technology transferred and used by many companies and impact tens of millions of people. He has been in collaborations with big companies including those in the Fortune 500 list, leaders in various sectors including IT (e.g. IBM, HP, Microsoft), Automobile (General Motors), Social (Tinder/Match), Communications (Bell), Fashion (Michael Kors), as well as technology startups. He currently serves as an advisor of Aerial Technologies, which is a startup company in the fields of wireless communications and artificial intelligence funded by Intel Capital etc.; Learnable AI Inc., which is an education company powered by deep reinforcement learning, and InfStones, a leading cloud-based bloackchain infrastructure provider. Further, he has mentored many young entrepreneurs. His past students also started several startups.