The Visual Information Processing and Learning (VIPL) research group was founded in 1997 by Prof. Wen Gao, an Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering. The VIPL is now attached to the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT, CAS) and the key Intelligent Information Processing Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The VIPL is also a part of the Joint Development Lab of the Advanced Human-Computer Communication Technology (JDL). The VIPL now has more than 20 research fellows, and more than 80 Ph.D. candidates/master students. The research interests of VIPL cover a wide spectrum of the topics in the field of AI, including but not limited to computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction, and affective computing. Up to now, the VIPL has published more than 500 research papers in the related fields, among which at least 200 ones were published in top-tier journals and conferences. With such achievements in AI, the VIPL was awarded the China National Natural Science Award (second class) in 2015 and the China National Science and Technology Progress Award (second class) in 2005. Aiming at top-level comprehensive achievements, the goal of VIPL in the long-run includes not only fundamental researches with high academic influence, but also technological innovations of promising practical value. As a result, many technologies output by VIPL have been successfully applied to real-world systems in the industry.