Reporting by XinZhiyuan
EDIT: Peaches sleepy
【New Zhiyuan Introduction】From the academic community to "cross-border" the Internet, and then turn around to start a business. This year, he was 40 years old and still chose to challenge himself. According to the news, Wang Gang, vice president of Alibaba and head of the autonomous driving laboratory of Damo Academy, has recently left his job. Ali, was his first stop. The next stop, it will be better.
From the academic world to "cross the Border" Internet, and then turn to start a business, the 40-year-old is still constantly challenging himself.
According to Tech Planet, Wang Gang, vice president of Alibaba and head of the autonomous driving laboratory of Damo Academy, has recently left his job and will start a business in the field of cleaning robots in the future.
Ali officials also confirmed Wang Gang's departure and affirmed his contribution to the exploration of unmanned driving technology, wishing him better development in the future.
Thank you Wang Gang for his contribution to the unmanned driving technology of Dharma Academy, and bless Wang Gang.
Wang Gang's departure is not without warning. According to tianyancha news, on December 17, 2021, Wang Gang completed the withdrawal in the industrial and commercial changes of Xiaomandon intelligent technology.
Ali was his first stop, and this plunge went on for five years.
The next stop, it will be better.
Studied under Li Feifei, a tenured professor at NTU
In 2005, Wang graduated from the Department of Computer Engineering of Harbin Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2010.
During his Ph.D., he studied under Li Fei-Fei, a top scholar in the field of artificial intelligence, and computer scientists David Forsyth and Derek Hoiem. He also received the prestigious Harriett/Robert Perry Scholarship and the CS/AI Award.
In July 2005, Feifei Li was also an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), after which she joined the UIUC Beckman Institute as a full-time faculty member.
http://svl.stanford.edu/assets/papers/WangZhangFei-Fei_CVPR2006.pdf
After accumulating enough scientific research skills, he joined Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2010 as a tenured professor and began a new journey.
This year, he was only 28 years old. He has become famous for a while before he crossed the border, and has published nearly 10 papers with more than 1,000 citations.
The team he coached won the top 5 in the ImageNet Scenario Classification Challenge in 2015 and 2016, and his technology has been used by more than 5 international companies.
Returned from the academic world and was first appointed as the chief scientist of Ali
In 2016, Alibaba established the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (A.I. Labs）。
After only one year in NTU, Wang Gang resolutely chose to join the Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Lab in March 2017 and successfully entered the industry.
He serves as Chief Scientist and is responsible for research and development of machine learning, computer vision, and natural language understanding.
Wang Gang, who was interviewed by Xinzhiyuan in 2017, once talked about his feelings about joining Alibaba Lab.
"My dream is similar to the dream of the whole laboratory, I hope to use artificial intelligence to enable these hardware, so that products with artificial intelligence capabilities can enter thousands of households, can be used by the public and consumers, and bring convenience to their lives, which is also my personal dream, I hope to see this day by our Ali artificial intelligence laboratory to achieve." 」
As the main technical leader, Wang Gang led the team to create an artificial intelligence consumer product "Tmall Genie X1", which became a blockbuster with shipments exceeding one million in only 4 months.
You know, this explosive product uses a number of Wang Gang's research results.
Seeing that the development of Tmall Genie was getting better and better, dissatisfied with the status quo, he made a surprising decision at this time - to take the initiative to ask for help and lead the team to do autonomous driving from 0 to 1.
In October 2017, the physical carrier organization of NASA's plan, "Dharma Academy", was officially unveiled, which set up an autonomous driving laboratory, and Wang Gang took the helm.
After spending 3 years and investing nearly $100 billion, the first mass-produced logistics robot led by him in 2020, "Little Wild Donkey", was finally launched.
The integration of the most cutting-edge technologies such as AI and automatic driving has pushed this cutting-edge science and technology to large-scale mass production and commercialization.
The next stop, self-employment
After leaving, Wang Gang chose to start a business in the field of cleaning robots and has obtained financing.
This year, he was 40 years old. After passing middle age, he still has a kind of courage to fight and dare to break through, like to focus, and when he is accurate, he will stumble to the end.
From the academic community all the way, Wang Gang's achievements in the field of AI are remarkable. The next stop is to start your own business better.
In addition, in 2016, for his outstanding contributions to the design of deep neural networks, Wang Gang became one of the 10 winners of the Asian Under-35 Innovation Award selected by the MIT Technology Review Journal.
He is also a member of the editorial board of IEEE TPAMI, the top magazine in the field of artificial intelligence, and has been invited to become the domain chair of top academic conferences on artificial intelligence, such as ICCV/CVPR/ECCV, and has deep research accumulation and international authority in the field of deep learning algorithms.
Google Scholar data shows that Wang Gang's papers have been cited more than 20,000 and the h-index is as high as 67, which is a solid and highly cited scholar.
In a speech, Wang Gang talked about how powerful the human brain is at interpreting speech and visual signals. Can we take inspiration from the human brain to build powerful computational neural networks to achieve similar performance?
The answer is yes. He described his research progress in developing brain-like deep learning algorithms with similar and interesting mechanisms, such as long-term memory engagement, adaptive information flow regulation, and selective attention.
AI Labs out of the tide, who will stay?
In recent years, the academic bulls of the Internet giants have left one after another. Some have returned to academia from industry, and some have come out of entrepreneurship.
Wang Gang's departure this time can be said to be another case of the "tide of scientists leaving".
Previously, Qi Yuan, former vice president of Ant Financial, chief scientist of Ant AI, head of the artificial intelligence department of Ant Financial, and head of financial intelligence of Damo Academy, returned to the academic world in November 2021 and joined Fudan.
In August 2021, Li Lei, director of ByteDance's AI Lab, left his job to join the University of Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Lei Li studied in the ACM class of the Department of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
He has published more than 40 papers in the fields of machine learning, data mining and natural language understanding in top international academic conferences, and served as the co-chair of the 2017 KDD Cup and KDD2018 Hands-on Tutorial and the program committee members of ICML, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI and other conferences.
In July 2020, Ma Weiying, vice president of ByteDance and director of AI Lab, left his post and joined the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University.
Ma holds his master's and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), has published more than 300 papers in world-class conferences and journals, and holds more than 160 technology patents.
He is an IEEE Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a former co-chair of the International Conference on Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2011), and a co-chair of the Program Committee of the International Internet Congress (WWW 2008).
In July 2020, Wei Xiushan, founding dean of Megvii Nanjing Research Institute, left his post and became a professor at Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
Wei Xiu is engaged in research in the field of artificial intelligence from Professor Zhou Zhihua and Professor Wu Jianxin of Nanjing University, mainly in the fields of computer vision and machine learning.
He has published more than 40 papers in international top journals and international top conferences in related fields, and his related work has won 4 world championships in international authoritative competitions in the field of computer vision such as iWildCam 2020, iNaturalist 2019, Apparent Personality Analysis 2016 and so on.
Chair of the ACCV 2022 Workshop, Chair of the Program Committee of the ICCV, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ACCV, etc., Senior Program Committee member or Domain Chair of AAAI 2022, IJCAI 2021, BMVC 2021.
In 2019, Zhang Tong, director of Tencent AI Lab, left his job to join the Innovation Factory, serving as the director of the joint laboratory between HKUST and the Innovation Workshop, and concurrently served as a research partner.
Tong Holds a double bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Cornell University and a master's and doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford University, and teaches in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
He has served as a tenured professor at the State University of New Jersey, a researcher at IBM Research institute and the chief scientist of Yahoo Research Institute, the vice president of Baidu Research Institute and the head of the big data laboratory, and the director of Tencent Al Lab.
He is the President or Domain Chair of top international machine learning conferences such as NIPS, ICML, COLT, and the editorial board of international first-class artificial intelligence journals such as PAMI, JMLR, and Machine Learning Journal.
But maybe this is not a bad thing, after all, they have always been inseparable from AI research.
Resources:
https://developer.aliyun.com/article/252978
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLNul6K2Z-0&list=PLxlCC91IvWyPSXm-_4lGwOOye3RXncCRo&index=35
https://www.sohu.com/a/492700361_114877