Brief biographical overviews of a select list of top Chinese AI researchers
Recently I came across a post by @ruima on X.com highlighting a few of the prominent people from the list of China's Top 100 AI researchers. That has inspired the following brief biographical overview of the Chinese AI researchers featured in @ruima's post:
He Kaiming
- Academic and Career Background: He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University in 2009 and 2012, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. He has served as a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and Facebook AI Research (FAIR). In 2022, he joined Google DeepMind as a Distinguished Scientist while retaining his tenured position at MIT.
- Contributions: As the creator of ResNet (Residual Network), his work has had a profound impact on the field of deep learning. ResNet has been widely applied in fields such as computer vision and has received over 400,000 citations. His research on residual learning has also driven the development of deep neural networks.
- Google Scholar Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DhtAFkwAAAAJ&hl=en
Zhang Xiangyu
- Academic and Career Background: Zhang joined Megvii after graduating from Tsinghua University. He is currently the Chief Scientist at StepFun.
- Contributions: He is a co-contributor to ResNet and ShuffleNet. ShuffleNet is widely used in mobile and automotive systems, particularly in scenarios with limited computing resources. His research has provided efficient solutions for implementing neural networks in resource-constrained environments.
- Google Scholar Profile:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yuB-cfoAAAAJ&hl=en
Ren Shaoqing
- Academic and Career Background: Ren received his Ph.D. in a joint Ph.D program between University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia, and he previously co-founded Momenta.ai. He is currently the head of autonomous driving technology at NIO.
- Contributions: He has achieved significant results in object detection and recognition within computer vision. His work has provided robust technical support for the development of autonomous driving technology.
- Homepage: https://shaoqingren.com/
Tian Qi
- Academic and Career Background: Tian graduated with a Bachelor of Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University and received his Ph.D from University of Illinois (UIUC). Tian was formerly the Chief Scientist for Computer Vision at Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab and is now the Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence at Huawei Cloud.
- Contributions: At Huawei Cloud, he lead his team to create Pangu-Weather, a critical part of the “the AI weather forecaster” recognized as Science’s 10 breakthroughs of 2023. In February 2024, Pangu-Weather AI Model was ranked 1st in Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2023, China by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
- Homepage: https://www.qitian1987.com/
Wang Yunhe
- Academic and Career Background: Wang received his Ph.D from Peking University. He has recently been promoted to head of AI Research at Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab.
- Contributions: Wang is known for his work in deep learning, model compression, and computer vision.
- Homepage: https://www.wangyunhe.site/
Xie Lingxi
- Academic and Career Background: Xie obtained his B.E. and Ph.D. in Engineering, both from Tsinghua University. He is a Senior Researcher at Huawei Technologies.
- Contributions: Xie is known for his work in computer vision, in particular the application of deep learning models. His research covers image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and other vision tasks.
- Homepage: http://lingxixie.com/
Wang Xiaogang
- Academic and Career Background: Wang received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Information Science from the University of Science and Technology of China, Master's degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his Ph.D, from M.I.T., USA. He is a co-founder of Sensetime and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- Contributions: Wang is known for his work on computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and applications to visual surveillance, face recognition, image and video searching, and medical imaging.
- Homepage: https://www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/en-gb/people/academic-staff/professors/prof-xiaogang-wang
Shi Jianping
- Academic and Career Background: Shi received her Bachelor of Engineering from Zhejiang University and her Ph.D from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is currently the Executive R&D Director at SenseTime.
- Contributions: Shi well-known starting up and building the Autonomous Driving R&D Product Team at SenseTime.
- Homepage: https://shijianping.me/
Yan Junjie
- Academic and Career Background: Yan received his Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and founded MiniMax, one of China's earliest large language model (LLM) startups.
- Contributions: He has led MiniMax in achieving significant progress in the development of large language models. His research has contributed to the advancement of natural language processing technologies.
- Google Scholar Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rEYarG0AAAAJ&hl=en
Cao Yue
- Academic and Career Background: Cao received his B.S. and Ph.D from the prestigious Tsinghua University, China. Cao was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and is now the founder and CEO of Sand.AI.
- Contributions: Cao is known for his contribution in Deep LEarning and Computer Vision.
- Homepage: http://yue-cao.me/
Liu Ziwei
- Academic and Career Background: Liu received his Ph.D from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently an Associate Professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
- Contributions: He is known for his work in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Computer Graphics.
- Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ziwei-liu-852b265a/?originalSubdomain=sg
Tao Dacheng
- Academic and Career Background: Tao received his B.Eng. from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), his M.Phil. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and his Ph.D. from the University of London. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
- Contributions: Tao is known for his work in computer vision, data mining, deep learning, image processing, and machine learning.
- Academic Profile: https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/entities/person/Tao-Dacheng
Jia Jiaya
- Academic and Career Background: Jia obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science jointly from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Microsoft Research. He is Chair Professor of Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and director of Von Neumann Institute. Jia is also the founder of SmartMore, a unicorn specializing in manufacturing optimization and automation (MOA).
- Contributions: Jia is known for his work on computer vision, language, and deep learning technologies, including image/video reasoning, VLM, multi-modal AI, and generative methods.
- Homepage: https://jiaya.me/home
Yang Ming-Hsuan
- Academic and Career Background: Yang is a professor at the University of California, Merced, and a researcher at DeepMind.
- Contributions: He has made notable contributions machine learning and machine perception.
- Homepage: https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/mhyang/
Liu Wei
- Academic and Career Background: Liu Wei obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. Liu was the head of Tencent's Hunyuan team.
- Contributions: He led the development of Hunyuan3D-1.0, which has supported over 700 internal AI applications. His work has driven the application of AI technologies within Tencent.
- Google Scholar Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AjxoEpIAAAAJ&hl=en
Yan Shuicheng
- Academic and Career Background: Yan has served as AI lead at 360 Group, YITU Technology, and Sea Group, and founded one of the largest vision labs in the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently a Distinguished Professor (Practice) at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.
- Contributions: He has made significant contributions to computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia analysis.
- Academic Profile: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/cs/people/yansc/