Dr. Haiwei Dong is an adjunct professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, as well as principal researcher for Huawei Technologies Canada. At Huawei Canada, Dr. Dong leads efforts to integrate AI methodologies across diverse fields to enhance product delivery, including inference optimization for large language models (LLMs), LLM-based code infilling and software vulnerability detection.
Previously, Dr. Dong served as principal engineer at Huawei Technologies Canada, leading teams dedicated to perception and planning in autonomous driving as well as developing multi-agent reinforcement learning-based metaverse streaming solutions.
Before joining Huawei Canada, Dr. Dong was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, from 2013 to 2016, concentrating on the fusion of artificial intelligence and multimedia. His research encompassed projects ranging from the 3D reconstruction of indoor environments to the precise tracking of human body movements from point clouds and the exploration of extended reality.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Dong served as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, where he helped establish a research lab at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research at NYU centred on the convergence of multimedia and robotics.
From 2011 to 2012, Dr. Dong served as a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, during which time he spent four months as a research associate at the University of Toronto. His focus was robotics, particularly the development of field robots for health-care applications. He earned a PhD from Kobe University in Japan in 2010, graduating early. He had received an M.Eng. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China in 2008.
Dr. Dong’s dedication to mentoring extends to considerable co-supervision, including 11 PhD students, 20 master’s students, 3 research engineers, and 7 interns as of 2024. Some of those he has supervised are still in the academy, including an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and scholars and PhD students at esteemed institutions such as UC Berkeley, Columbia University and Cornell University. Others have joined industry, becoming researchers and engineers at Google, Apple, IBM, Citadel, Thomson Reuters, Cisco, Alibaba, Ford, Shopify, Yelp and other companies.
Dr. Dong has co-authored 89 research papers, including 10 book chapters, 46 peer-reviewed journal and magazine papers and 33 conference proceeding papers. He prioritizes publishing in prestigious journals such as IEEE and ACM Transactions and in magazines. His research projects have been frequently reported on, including in New Scientist Magazine, Kobe Newspaper and the uOttawa Gazette.
Dr. Dong’s editorial roles have included serving as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications since 2022; associate editor of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine since 2022; and department editor of IEEE Multimedia Magazine since 2022. He actively participates in the paper-handling process, ensuring the quality of published work on artificial intelligence and immersive reality.
In addition to his scholarly contributions, Dr. Dong is a sought-after speaker, having delivered presentations at esteemed universities and institutes worldwide, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, King’s College London, McMaster University, Heidelberg University, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Dong holds memberships in various professional organizations. He has been a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2016; a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 2018; and a licensed Professional Engineer of Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) since 2017.