On November 8, the 2019 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Ceremony was grandly held. Zhenpeng Chen, a PhD studen was elected, becoming the only winner from Peking University in this year.

Zhenpeng Chen, supervised by Professor Hong Mei and Professor Xuanzhe Liu, is mainly engaged in research on Web Mining and Software Engineering. He has published four full papers in top-tier conferences, including WWW, ESEC/FSE, UbiComp, etc. His paper "Emoji-Powered Representation Learning for Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification" at WWW 2019 was selected as the Best Full Paper Award out of 1,247 full paper submissions. This is the first time that a Chinese academic research institution has won this honor in the history of WWW.

Background: The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program identifies the next generation of research leaders through a unique program that offers a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to promising young candidates. Since its inception in 1999, the program has awarded 417 outstanding PhD students the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship honor. Fellows have gone on to become prominent researchers and influential individuals in academia and industry. Fellows earn both a scholarship and enjoy a long-term professional relationship with Microsoft Research Asia, one of the leading computer science research labs in the world. Each winner is offered the opportunity to complete an internship, during which they participate in hands-on, advanced research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.

In 2019, over one hundred distinguished PhD candidates from 31 leading research academic institutions in China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore were nominated for the 2019 Microsoft Research Asia fellowships. After evaluating each application, the review committee selected 12 outstanding PhD candidates whose exceptional talent and innovation in computer science-related research identifies them as emerging leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.