Ting Cao

Cao Ting is a leading artificial intelligence researcher who left Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in July 2025 to join Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research, heading a research group under the directorship of Zhang Yaqin, a former MSRA managing director.

Cao's departure is part of a broader exodus from MSRA, which has come under increasing pressure from US government restrictions on AI research in China. MSRA, established by Bill Gates in 1998 and once called "the hottest computer lab in the world", has seen an acceleration in researcher departures as compliance restrictions and China's booming domestic AI sector create competing pressures.

At Tsinghua, Cao is contributing to China's rapidly expanding AI research ecosystem, working at a top institution that has benefited disproportionately from the reverse brain drain of Chinese AI talent from US companies and universities.

As a Research Professor at AIR, Cao's work centers on Edge AI, large foundation model algorithms, AI inference systems, and novel AI accelerators, building on research that has made it possible to run complex deep neural networks and large language models directly on consumer devices. Her innovations have been integrated into products used by millions, including Microsoft Office, Windows, Bing, and Huawei's HarmonyOS. Her academic honors include the 2012 ACM Research Highlights and IEEE Micro Top Picks awards, the 2021 ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlights award, and best paper recognitions at PPoPP, MobiSys, NAS, and ICCD. Turing Award laureate David Patterson highlighted her quantitative power-and-performance analysis in a technical perspective article, with her findings later incorporated into the widely used textbook Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Before returning to China, she spent 2018 to 2025 as Principal Researcher and Research Manager at MSRA, following two years as a Senior Software Engineer at Huawei Technologies from 2016 to 2018. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers.