Dr. Yan Lu Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia

Yan Lu is the Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), where he oversees research on Future Media Experience, spanning multimedia, immersive AI, agentic AI, and human-computer interaction. His work explores how media and AI converge to shape the future of communication and collaboration. At Microsoft, Yan Lu has an extensive record of driving innovation across real-time communication, computer vision, audio enhancement, immersive computing, and mobile-cloud systems. Many technologies from his team have been integrated into products such as Windows, Office, Teams, Skype, Xbox, and Azure Media Services. He currently leads efforts in developing neural video communication technology at Microsoft.

Before joining MSRA in 2004, Yan Lu led the video coding group at the JDL Lab, Institute of Computing Technology, China. He made significant contributions to international standards such as MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AOM AV1. He was also recognized as an editor and a key technical contributor of the first version of AVS video standard.