Tang Xiaoou, the founder of SenseTime, passed away due to illness and was named one of the top five computer scientists in Asia in 2020

Interface News Reporter | Yu Hao

Interface News Editor |

On December 16, SenseTime released an obituary, Tang Xiaoou, founder of SenseTime, artificial intelligence scientist, director of Pujiang Laboratory, director of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and professor of Chinese University of Hong Kong, died at 23:45 on December 15, 2023.

The full text of the obituary is as follows:

It is with great sadness that we announce to you a sad news: our beloved founder, artificial intelligence scientist, director of Pujiang Laboratory, director of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and professor of Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tang Xiaoou, has left us forever at 23:45 on December 15, 2023.

Professor Tang Xiaoou is an outstanding representative of the field of artificial intelligence in mainland China. He is knowledgeable, rigorous, pragmatic, pioneering and innovative, full of family and country feelings and strategic vision. He is willing to serve as a ladder for others, reward post-graduates, be determined to innovate, bravely shoulder heavy responsibilities, dedicate all his energy to computer science research, actively promote the development of original technology, and make outstanding contributions to the development of science and technology in the field of artificial intelligence in mainland China. He has been cultivating students for more than 20 years. They will inherit the spirit and philosophy of Professor Tang Xiaoou and move forward bravely on the road of developing artificial intelligence.

At this sad moment, we would like to express our deepest condolences to Professor Tang Xiaoou's family! Professor Tang Xiaoou's wisdom, enthusiasm and endless exploration of science will always inspire us to stay true to our original aspirations and forge ahead. His company's mission "Insist on Originality and Let Artificial Intelligence Lead Human Progress" will inspire all SenseTime people to climb new heights and complete his unfinished business. May Professor Tang Xiaoou rest in peace!

I am sorry for my obituary.

SenseTime

Professor Tang Xiaoou's funeral working group

December 16, 2023

In October 2014, Tang Xiaoou, together with his laboratory members and practitioners in related fields, founded SenseTime. Nine years later, SenseTime has developed into a listed company with a total market value of HK$42.171 billion, and its artificial intelligence technology has also been implemented in smart cities, automobiles, medical and other fields. 

Aside from the identity of the founder of SenseTime, Tang Xiaoou's achievements in the field of artificial intelligence are even more eye-catching. In 2014, the accuracy rate of the face recognition algorithm released by Tang Xiaoou's team surpassed the human eye for the first time, reaching 98.52%. In 2015, Tang Xiaoou won the Best Student Paper Award for the first time at AAAI, an international academic conference with the highest impact factor in the field of artificial intelligence.

In addition, Tang Xiaoou also served as the director of the visual computing group of Microsoft Research Asia, the first Chinese editor-in-chief of an international journal of computer vision, a tenured professor in the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Hong Kong Chinese, and was named one of the top five computer scientists in Asia in 2020 by Guide2Research.

In 1968, Tang Xiaoou was born in Anshan, Liaoning Province. After graduating from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1990, Tang went on to study at the University Xi of Rochester in the United States, where he received his master's degree in 1991 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. According to Xinhua News Agency, it was while studying for a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States that Tang Xiaoou began to come into contact with facial recognition algorithms. 

After receiving his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he returned to China to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, while continuing his research in computer vision-related fields. In July 2001, Tang Xiaoou founded the Multimedia Laboratory (also known as MMLab), focusing on the research of computer vision and multimedia technology. Research projects include intelligent security systems based on image recognition, the application of virtual reality technology in the field of education, and video content analysis.

MMLab's research results have been widely recognized and valued internationally. From 2011 to 2013, the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) and the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), two of the most important conferences on computer vision, a total of 29 articles from around the world focused on deep learning Xi, of which 14 were from MMLab Lab. In 2016, MMLab was selected as one of the world's top 10 AI pioneer laboratories along with MIT, Stanford University and other famous universities. 

MMLab has also become the "Whampoa Military Academy" for talents in the field of artificial intelligence. Among Tang Xiaoou's students, Wang Xiaogang led the team to win the world championship of ImageNet, the first large-scale visual recognition challenge in the history of Chinese scholars, in 2015, the popular architecture in the field of computer vision developed by He Kaiming, Deep Residual Networks (ResNets), which became the basis for large model series such as GPT, and Lin Dahua led the launch of OpenMMLab, the most influential visual algorithm open source project in the world.

While shining in the academic field, Tang Xiaoou has also been thinking about how to use computer vision and artificial intelligence in daily life. In 2014, when the research results were announced, Tang Xiaoou's team officially founded SenseTime Technology and began to commercialize the technology. With the financing and listing of SenseTime Group, Tang Xiaoou has also become a successful representative of scholar entrepreneurship, and has been listed on the "Hurun Global Rich List" many times with a value of more than 10 billion yuan.

Different from the stereotype of rigorous and unsmiling scholars, Tang Xiaoou has a very humorous personality. During his time at Microsoft Research Asia, Tang Xiaoou was unanimously elected as the head of the Institute's Art Troupe and Secretary of the Youth League Committee, and served as the host of the Institute's annual art evening for three consecutive years.

This character is also reflected in Tang Xiaoou's literary works. In his autobiography "The First Ming in the Sky", Tang Xiaoou recorded the research experience of Microsoft Research Asia, and also interspersed with the growth experience of his beloved son Tang Zhiming (Mingming).

It was mentioned in the article that out of his love for Mingming, Tang Xiaoou took tens of thousands of photos for the child, which were often used in various experimental data of the visual computing group, and turned out to be the most popular image model in the group. At the same time, the real-time image retrieval and other technologies developed by the team have also brought convenience to the organization of family photos, so Tang Xiaoou joked in the article that he has once again become a "useful person" at home.

From Mingming to thousands of households, Tang Xiaoou and his team have promoted the popularization of facial recognition technology. This is a microcosm of the wave of artificial intelligence sweeping the world, and Tang Xiaoou and his team members are undoubtedly the trendsetters of this era. "We have enjoyed the country's high-quality educational resources in the process of growing up, and we should do something meaningful for source innovation and strive for Chinese in basic research, which is the sentiment that contemporary Chinese intellectuals should have." Tang Xiaoou said.