CCNY’s Yingli Tian beats the odds to become IEEE Fellow

Four hundred thousand professionals are working across the globe to advance technology for humanity as members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  Each year, the organization elevates less than 1/10th of 1% of them to “Fellow”. Only 3% of that 1/10 of 1% are women. Yingli Tian, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York is one of those women.

Tian has been elevated to Fellow, effective 2018, by the IEEE in recognition of her contributions in two fields. As a world-leading expert in automatic facial expression analysis, Tian’s research on automatic facial expression analysis and the database has had significant impact on the research community and in industry. Her work has proved invaluable when applied to areas such as lie detection, banking, assisted driving, cultural differences, machine learning, and American Sign Language – just to name a few.

Tian’s status as a global technical leader in human activity understanding and monitoring was also a factor in her elevation. Her research work on video surveillance has been integrated into the IBM Smart Surveillance System, helping to detect things like whether a seemingly abandoned package is threatening or not.

All told, Tian’s work thus far has garnered nearly 200 publications with 12,400 citations worldwide, and more than $6 million in research grants.

About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided low-cost, high-quality education for New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. Today more than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight professional schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship.  Now celebrating its 170th anniversary, CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.

Contact Rebecca Rivera rrivera1@ccny.cuny.edu 212.650.5310