Leeds alumnus receives Chinese Academy of Sciences award for teaching

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has awarded a national prize in teaching to a graduate of the School of Computing.

Haoxiang (Sean) Wang, who undertook his Masters and PhD at the School, received the prestigious award in a ceremony held in December 2020.

The award programme is jointly issued by the Computer teaching steering committee of the Ministry of Education, China Computer Society (CCF) and China Teacher Development Foundation.

Initially launched by Professor John Hopcroft, winner of Turing Award, and Professor Gao Wen, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the programme aims to evaluate and improve the teaching quality of lecturers in computer science in Chinese universities and colleges. After a year of nationwide evaluation and selection, 54 teachers were honoured as winners.

After completing his Masters in Information Systems and PhD at Leeds in 2007, with the thesis title “Collaborative Visualisation in the Grid Environment”, Haoxiang joined the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology (SCUT) as a lecturer.

Now an associate professor at SCUT, he is working on projects to exploit deep learning approaches to emotion recognition from video and audio. Haoxiang’s research areas include affective computing, recommender systems, and next-generation networks. He currently teaches modules on Computer Networks and Operating Systems.