From Beijing to Israel and back; then onwards to Hong Kong, Dr Liu Wenyin has accomplished more than most in under 40 years, and won the prestigious ICDAR Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) 2003 along the way. Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS) since 2002, Dr Liu has authored or coauthored over 100 publications, has seven patents pending and reached Senior Member grade in the IEEE.

In 1995, when his wife's work led him to Israel, Dr Liu studied at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, founded in 1924, with Professor Dov Dori as his doctoral advisor. According to Professor Dori, "ever since he started his academic career, Liu demonstrated creativity and zealousness, producing an impressive number of research achievements." Dr Liu has fond memories of his three years in Haifa: "Israel is beautiful--it looks like a European country to me. And the technology, physics and IT are at top levels, equal to Europe and the US in every way."

Dr Liu returned to his post as Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in Tsinghua University, until accepting a job at Microsoft Research, China in 1999. But he decided to move once more, because "there's more freedom for research in Hong Kong." Now happily settled at CityU, Dr Liu's CS colleague, Professor Horace H S Ip, decided to nominate him for the ICDAR (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition) award, which comes up every three years. "Liu has done significant research on Graphic Recognition and Performance Evaluation, in particular, and has been active in service to the research community", Professor Ip said. Dr Liu won, thanks to "an accumulation of experience" remarkable for a researcher of his age.

Having accepted his plaque in Edinburgh, Dr Liu is now gearing up to chair the Sixth IAPR Workshop on Graphics Recognition, scheduled to take place in Hong Kong in the summer of 2005—a new challenge that he hopes will be a success, and benefit CityU in the process.