Steve Liu
Associate Vice President of Research and Professor of Computer Science and Machine Learning
Research Interests
Dr. Liu’s fields of interest include: AI, Machine Learning, and Applications Intelligent Computing and Communications Systems Sustainable Computing Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).
Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Liu was a Full Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He has been also an associate member of the Quebec AI Institute (Mila) and the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM). In addition to his academic achievements, Professor Liu has held prominent industry roles, developing innovative research and technology and bridging them with impactful practical applications. Notably, from 2019 to 2024, he was Vice President of R&D, Chief Scientist, and Co-Director at Samsung AI Center Montréal. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the Chief Scientist for Tinder Inc., the world’s largest dating and social discovery platform, valued at over USD 10 billion at the time. 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) etc. He serves as an advisor to multiple technology startups.
Professor Liu is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. His accolades include the 2017 Mitacs Award for Exceptional Leadership – Professor, the 2014 Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association of Computer Science, and McGill University’s Tomlinson Scientist Award, recognizing his excellence and leadership in science.
He founded McGill’s Cyber-Physical Intelligence Lab in 2007 and serves as its director.
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- M.S. in Computer Science, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- M.E. in Automatic Control, Tsinghua University.
- B.S. in Applied Math, Tsinghua University.
- Best Paper Award: paper "What Appears Suboptimal May Surprise You: A Fixed-Rate Schedul- ing Policy for Geo-Distributed CoFlows," receives the Outstanding Paper Award of The 29th IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE ICPADS 2023), 2023
- Best Paper Award: paper "CATS: A Computation-Aware Transaction Processing System with Proactive Unlocking," receives the Best Paper Award from The 2023 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2023), 2023
- Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2021
- Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, 2021
- Best Paper Award: paper "One for All: Traffic Prediction at Heterogeneous 5G Edge with Data-Efficient Transfer Learning'' receives the Best Paper Award from 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE GLOBECOM 2021) Mobile and Wireless Networks Symposium, 2021
- Best Paper Award: paper "A Cost-Efficient Metadata Scheme for High-Performance Deduplication Systems'' receives the Best Paper Award from The 23rd IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (IEEE HPCC 2021), 2021
- Best Paper Award: paper "CE-Dedup: Cost-Effective Convolutional Neural Nets Training based on Image Deduplication''receives the Best Paper Award from The 19th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (IEEE ISPA 2021), 2021
- IEEE Fellow, IEEE, 2020
- ACM Distinghuished Member, ACM, 2020
- Best Paper Award: paper "RadioLoc: Learning Vehicle Locations with FM Signal in All-Terrain Environments'' receives the Best Paper Award from The 16th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (IEEE MASS), 2019
- 2017 Mitacs Award for Exceptional Leadership, MITACS, 2017
- Best Paper Award: paper "Towards a Cost-Efficient MapReduce: Mitigating Power Peaks for Hadoop Clusters'' receives the Best Paper Award of the Year from Tsinghua Science and Technology and IEEE, 2015
- Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prizes, The Canadian Association of Computer Science/Association informatique Canadienne, 2014
- William Dawson Scholar (Chair Professor), McGill University, 2014
- Tomlinson Scientist Award, McGill University, 2012
- Best Paper Award: paper "Inferring User's Online Activities through Traffic Analysis" receives the First Place Best Paper Award (out of 87 submissions) from the Fourth ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec'11), 2011
- Paper "Hardware/Software Partitioning and Pipelined Scheduling on Runtime Reconfigurable FPGAs", published in ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), is the #2 of the Top 10 Downloaded ACM TODAES Articles in the year 2010
- Samuel R. Thompson Chair Professorship, University of Nebraska Lincoln, 2010 - 2014
- Outstanding Service Award, 7th IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS-2010), 2010
- John R. Evans Leaders Fund Award, Canada Foundation for Innovation, 2009
- New Researcher Award, Quebec Fund for Research on Nature and Technology (FQRNT), 2009
- Outstanding Leadership Award, 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE 2009), 2009
- Best Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), for the paper "ORTEGA: An Efficient and Flexible Online Fault Tolerance Architecture for Real-Time Control Systems," 2008
- Paper "Lightning: A Hard Real-Time, Fast, and Lightweight Low-End Wireless Sensor Election Protocol for Acoustic Event Localization," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC),Vol. 7, Issue 5, pp.570-584, May, 2008 Selected as the Featured Article of IEEE TMC 2008 May Issue
- Discovery Grant Award, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), 2007
- Mavis Memorial Fund Scholarship Award, College of Engineering, UIUC, 2005-2006
- 4th Place, International MaRTian Task Robot Competition, in conjunction with RTSS’05, Miami, Florida, 2005
- Outstanding TA Award, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, 2004
- Outstanding Rating for Instructors, Incomplete List for Teaching Excellence, UIUC, Spring, 2004
- Saburo Muroga Fellowship, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, 2003-2004
- Member, Tau Beta Pi (Engineering Honor Society), 2002-now
- C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, 2002
- Member, Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society, 2002
- Ray Ozzie Fellowship, Department of Computer Science, UIUC, 2000-2001