Haibin Ling

Haibin Ling is an acclaimed computer scientist and IEEE Fellow who left his position as Empire Innovation Professor at Stony Brook University in New York in December 2025 to join Westlake University in Hangzhou as Chair Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, where he leads the Intelligent Computing and Application Lab.

Ling earned his B.S. and M.S. from Peking University in 1997 and 2000, then a PhD from the University of Maryland in 2006. He was an assistant researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (2000-2001), completed a postdoc at UCLA (2006-2007), worked as a research scientist at Siemens Corporate Research, and joined Temple University in 2008, rising to associate professor. He later became Empire Innovation Professor at Stony Brook University. He received the Best Student Paper Award at ACM UIST in 2003 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2014.

Ling is widely known as the creator of the core leaf-recognition algorithm behind LeafSnap, the world's first mobile plant identification app, which grew out of one of his PhD research projects. At Westlake, his research spans computer vision, augmented reality, medical image analysis, machine learning, and AI for science. At 51, he said Westlake offered greater freedom and inclusivity for "fresh exploration" beyond increasingly mature traditional AI fields.