Washington DC, February 8, 2017, the National Academy of Engineering announced the 2017 new academician list, a total of 106 new academicians, including 84 new members and 22 foreign members. This brought the total U.S. Membership to 2,281 and the number of foreign members to 249. Shum Heung-Yeung, Southeast University outstanding alumni, Microsoft global executive vice president, and other famous Chinese scholars were elected. 

The National Institute of Engineering (NAE) is one of the highest honors in the American engineering community. It honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education and to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education. The National Institute of Engineering, as well as the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National School of Medicine and the US National Science Research Council is known as the United States four major national academic institutions. The Academy awards three prizes, the Fritz J. and Dolores Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize and the Charles Stark Draper Prize. 

Shum Heung-Yueng is the Microsoft global executive vice President, head of Microsoft’s technology and research and development departments. He is mainly responsible for promoting the company long-term overall technical strategy, strategic and forward-looking research ad development work. And now he is elected as foreign academician of NAE.

Shum Heung-Yeung was born in 1966, from Lishui, Nanjing. In 1980, he was admitted to Department of Automatic Control, Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University) at the age of 14. He was the youngest student, a genius. He once said Fortunately, I’ve got lots of instructions from senior students and professors of Southeast University, which influence me a lot.”Then he received a master's degree in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong University. After that, he studied at Carnegie Mellon University and earned a PhD in robotics from its School of Computer Science in 1996. He dedicates himself to computer vision, graphics, human-computer interaction, statistical learning, pattern recognition and robotics. He is a world-class expert in computer vision and graphics research. He is also a member of the IEEE Fellow, , ACM Fellow, and a former member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computational Visual, acting as chairman of the 2007 International Conference on Computer Vision. He has published more than 100 papers on computer vision, computer graphics, graphic recognition, statistical learning and robot science, with more than 50 US patents. On November 14, 2013, Microsoft officially appointed him as Microsoft's global executive vice president, in charge of Microsoft technology and research and development departments. He is mainly responsible for promoting the company's long-term overall technical strategy, strategic and forward-looking research and development work. Meanwhile, he also heads Microsoft Research, one of the world’s leading computer science research institutes. He is one of the leading Chinese computer scientists at Microsoft's top global management team.