Source: Official Weibo
Reporter / Fang Wenyu Editor / Chen Xiaoping
A star in the AI industry has unfortunately fallen.
On June 14, Megvii Technology issued an obituary, and Dr. Sun Jian, chief scientist of Megvii and president of The Megvii Research Institute, died in the early morning of the same day due to the ineffectiveness of rescue from sudden illness.
"Megvii has lost a leader in exploration and innovation in the field of artificial intelligence technology." Obituary said.
In academia, Sun Jian is just as important, he is the first dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence of Xi'an Jiaotong University. The homepage of the college's official website has been grayed out as a token of condolence.
He died young and mourned in the industry.
For the sudden death of Sun Jian, many people can not accept, his two friends told the "21CBR" reporter, "too sad to express", and politely declined the interview.
School years are young
Sun Jian is a famous scientist in the field of artificial intelligence.
According to public resumes, Dr. Sun Jian is a native of Xi'an, born in 1976, graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University, completed undergraduate, master's and doctoral studies, and obtained a doctorate degree in electronic engineering (pattern recognition and intelligent control).
In 2003, Jian Sun joined Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as a principal investigator and other positions before joining Megvii.
Sun Jian became famous very early, and in 2010, he was selected into the "Innovators under 35" list of MIT Technology Review, whose main research directions are computer vision and computational photography.
Since 2002, he has published more than 100 academic papers in leading academic conferences and journals, and in 2009 and 2016, he won the CVPR (IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) Best Paper Award.
CVPR is one of the top three academic conferences in computer vision, and he has also served as the chairman of the CVPR field for many times.
In 2017, the Megvii team led by Sun Jian defeated giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook at ICCV, another top conference in the field of computer vision, and won the single championship of the COCO (Common Object Image Recognition) competition, and Megvii also became the first Chinese enterprise to win the championship in COCO.
From 2017 to 2019, the Megvii team won the third consecutive world championship of MS COCO Object Detection.
Megvii's official materials say that Sun Jian's invention of ResNet (cloud deep learning algorithm, deep residual network) is the world's first hundred-layer deep neural network, "creating a milestone in the field of deep learning."
According to Google Scholar, as of June 21, 2021, Dr. Jian Sun's paper has been cited more than 204,000 times (H-index 111).
Because of its excellent academic status, in January 2019, Xi'an Jiaotong University established the School of Artificial Intelligence, and Sun Jian became the first dean.
It is rare for a current executive of an innovative company to serve as the dean of a prestigious school.
Entrepreneurial executives
In July 2016, Sun Jian joined Megvii Technology as Chief Scientist.
He was mentor to Megvii founder Inchi at MSRA, who regarded him as an initiation teacher for scientific research.
"The addition of Dr. Sun Jian has undoubtedly enabled us to gain strong and sustained scientific research strength and strategic advantages in the basic research of deep learning." Indie said in his 2016 internal letter.
As the chief scientist of Megvii and the president of Megvii Research Institute, Sun Jian is fully responsible for the research and development of Megvii technology and leads a large technical team.
As of the end of June 2021, Megvii Research Institute has more than 300 AI algorithm researchers, and its workload can be imagined.
There are reports that Sun Jian went to work normally at the company the day before his death, but did not see anything unusual.
He has led Megvii Research Institute to develop a number of innovative technologies, such as ShuffleNet, an efficient convolutional neural network on mobile, Megvii MegGenine, an open source deep learning framework, and Brain++, an AI productivity platform.
Megvii Technology's complete AIoT product system Source: official website
These technologies form the basis of Megvii's multiple core services.
For example, Megvii's multiple deep learning models deployed in the cloud, namely ResNet based on its participation, have been applied to the cloud SaaS service FaceID and Face++, and the urban AIoT operating system "Kunlun" and other products.
Megvii's prospectus shows that Sun Jian is one of the 8 core technical personnel. He briefly served as a director of Megvii in 2019, only serving for about half a year, that is, refocusing on the technology field.
Thanks to the efforts of him and his colleagues, Megvii has won at least 42 world championships or the highest honors in the world's top competitions in the field of computer vision, and has become "one of the few companies in the world with independently developed deep learning frameworks".
Humble and focused
Sun Jian is a technical expert with dazzling glory, and more people use "modesty and concentration" to describe him.
An industry insider told the "21CBR" reporter that when he went to South Korea to participate in the ICCV in 2019, he became acquainted with Dr. Sun Jian, "Teacher Sun insists on doing concise and his own work, which has a huge promotion for the development of the field of computer vision and artificial intelligence, and is a model for my generation." ”
Being humble and fond of encouraging young people is the impression that Sun Jian left on others.
He Kaiming, a scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), published ResNet research as the first author under the guidance of Sun Jian during his internship at Microsoft Research Asia, and won the 2016 CVPR Best Paper.
Megvii Technology's values are "pursuit, extreme, simple and reliable", and Sun Jian participated in shaping this culture.
"'Pursuit, ultimate' has two meanings, one is that we must be the best, and the other is to make the best efforts to realize all the potential." In reality, he also always insisted on what he said.
He himself commented on the company he works for, "In addition to having abundant computing resources, it has an environment that encourages continuous high-speed innovation and a culture that pursues the ultimate." ”
According to the self-media "Noise Reduction NoNoise" report, after joining Megvii, the first thing Sun Jian did when he came to the company every day was to browse interesting new papers on the Internet and then share them with young people.
He used to conduct in-depth research with various groups every week and share his research ideas and methods.
"I ask myself every day what I should do, so that everyone has a clear goal, so that everyone can use their potential to do these things."
On the official website of the School of Artificial Intelligence of Xi'an Jiaotong University, the information on Sun Jian's itinerary is limited, which shows that he himself participated in the summer camp and reported on the report.
The college has a "Xi'an Jiaotong University-Microsoft Research Asia" joint doctoral program and a "Megvii Scholarship", which should contribute a lot.
For Megvii, which has just restarted its IPO, Sun Jian's departure is sad. Yin Qi expressed his condolences on social media, "Sun Jian, all the way! The unfinished business will be completed. ”
On the wall of Megvii Research Institute, the research mission laid down by Sun Jian is still hanging: continuous innovation to expand cognitive boundaries, and extraordinary science and technology to achieve product value.
Although the shell is strong, the will lives on.