Tang Xiaoou, the founder of SenseTime, passed away suddenly, and his focus shifted to the national laboratory before his death

The industry has lost a leading figure and an interesting soul.

Text: Zhao Yanqiu, Zhou Luping

Edited by You Yong

On the afternoon of December 16, there was bad news from the Chinese industrial intelligence community, Tang Xiaoou, founder of SenseTime Technology, 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.

Tang Xiaoou was born in 1968 and is only 55 years old this year. And last year, Sun Jian, chief scientist of Megvii Technology, died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 45. "It's a pity" and "accident", industry insiders said that the untimely death of the two leaders is a huge loss for Chinese's artificial intelligence field.

Several SenseTime people told Digital Intelligence Frontline that although Tang Xiaoou is the major shareholder and soul of SenseTime, he did not take a temporary position after SenseTime went public, nor did he attend SenseTime's activities, and basically only appeared at the annual meeting.

According to the prospectus of SenseTime, Tang Xiaoou is the largest shareholder of SenseTime, with a shareholding ratio of 21.73%. At the beginning of SenseTime's listing, the stock price soared, and Tang Xiaoou's worth was once as high as more than 50 billion Hong Kong dollars. Not long ago, SenseTime was shorted by the American short-selling agency "Grizzly Bear". SenseTime responded in a follow-up announcement that as of the date of the announcement, Tang Xiaoou had not sold any shares of the company actually owned by him since the company's listing.

01

"One of the few leading figures"

Tang Xiaoou is considered by the industry to be "one of the few leading figures in Chinese's artificial intelligence industry".

An industry veteran told the front line of digital intelligence that SenseTime, founded by Tang Xiaoou, is itself the vanguard of domestic artificial intelligence companies. Before his death, Tang Xiaoou served as the director of the Pujiang Laboratory and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is a new national artificial intelligence research and development institution with a strategic role and heavy responsibilities.

In the direction of artificial intelligence vision, Tang Xiaoou has a high status and is known as the "pioneer" of global face recognition technology. In 2001, Tang Xiaoou established the Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Tang Xiaoou once introduced, "From 2011 to 2013, at the international summit CVPR and ICCV, a total of 29 deep science Xi papers were published around the world, of which 14 came from our laboratory, and we have 18 studies that applied deep science Xi to specific problems including face recognition and object detection. At the door of Deep Learning Xi, we rang the doorbell 18 times. The start-up team of this lab was later the predecessor of SenseTime.

The milestone achievement of "Deep Learning Xi in the First 10 Years of Chinese Artificial Intelligence is Deep Residual Networks (ResNets), which was published by Tang Xiaoou's student He Kaiming as the first author and Sun Jian, who died young last year, and others. Industry insiders told Digital Intelligence Frontline.

Tang Xiaoou also serves as a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, cultivating a large number of talents in the field of artificial intelligence, and is a well-known "Hong Kong Chinese team".

According to several people who came into contact with Tang Xiaoou, Tang Xiaoou is a scholar and a professor, and in contact with his work, he is very pragmatic, simple in his words, and attaches importance to the results of his work.

Before his death, Tang Xiaoou's focus had shifted to building a new type of national R&D institution in the field of artificial intelligence. In July 2020, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was inaugurated, and Tang Xiaoou served as the director of the laboratory. He has introduced in relevant activities that the laboratory is actively gathering important international and domestic scientific and technological forces, with Shanghai as the center, relying on three core bases - Beijing, Hangzhou and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to promote construction.

Because the R&D institution is a brand-new system and form, it is necessary to carry out strategic, original and forward-looking scientific research and technological research, as well as ecological construction, Tang Xiaoou has done a lot of work, "it is not easy".

This year, Tang Xiaoou led the team to release the "Fengwu" large model, the general large model system for scholars, and the "CCTV listening to media large model" in cooperation with CCTV. Recently, the laboratory and the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology jointly initiated the establishment of the "Large Model Capability Evaluation and Collaborative Innovation Platform", and sincerely invited industry and research institutions to jointly build a large model innovation and application ecology.

Previously, Tang Xiaoou served as the director of the visual computing group at Microsoft Research Asia, and was also the main force of visual research.

"From all angles, Tang Xiaoou is a leader. Senior people in the artificial intelligence community told the front line of digital intelligence.

02

Talent Whampoa Military Academy and "Talk Show Actor"

In 1968, Tang Xiaoou was born in an ordinary working family in Anshan, Liaoning Province. At the age of 17, he was admitted to the Department of Precision Mechanics and Precision Instruments of the University of Science and Technology of China from Anshan No. 1 High School in Liaoning Province, and received a master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1991 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.

After graduating with a Ph.D., Tang Xiaoou joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong to teach and founded the Multimedia Laboratory Chinese of the University of Hong Kong. From 2005 to 2007, Tang Xiaoou joined Microsoft Research Asia, running both in Hong Kong and Beijing.

In October 2014, Tang Xiaoou took the lead in founding SenseTime, and the academic achievements in the field of machine vision have moved from the laboratory to the industry. Prior to its IPO, SenseTime's R&D team consisted of 40 professors, more than 250 PhDs and postdoctoral fellows, and 3,593 scientists and engineers. Prior to its IPO, SenseTime had received 12 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of more than $5.2 billion. Tang Xiaoou is credited with bringing computer vision technology from the ivory tower to the business world, and it has been successful.

In addition to his contributions to the cultivation of Chinese artificial intelligence talents and his technical and commercial success, Tang Xiaoou also has the natural humor gene of Northeast people. He loves movies, and he always makes an impression when he speaks at industry conferences in movies and easy-to-understand language. The Chinese artificial intelligence circle has an interesting assessment of Tang Xiaoou: an outstanding talk show actor delayed by the cause of artificial intelligence.

His humor was fully demonstrated on various occasions, such as "The organizing committee told me that there were about 10 million people watching the live broadcast on the Internet today, so I was very nervous, so I made a 100-page PPT, and I thought that 100,000 people per page would be worthy of the audience, but the organizing committee was very nervous, and kept asking me if I would overtime if I would talk about 100 pages in 40 minutes, and I assured them that I would rest assured, it will definitely be." ”

At the 2017 Alibaba Yunqi Conference, Tang Xiaoou said: "Ali is talking about 'making the world have no difficult business', and doing artificial intelligence is talking about 'making the world no difficult to brag about'." ”

During his tenure at Microsoft Research Asia, the versatile Tang Xiaoou was unanimously elected as the head of the Institute's Art Troupe, and served as the host of the Institute's annual art evening for three consecutive years, and he even gave himself a stage name "Little O".

In a recent public speech this year, Tang Xiaoou shared the original contributions made by three of his students in the field of large models, including Wang Xiaogang to make the machine's face recognition ability surpass the human eye, He Kaiming developed a deep residual network to make the network deeper and help today's large models, and Lin Dahua developed a series of 100-billion-level parameter large models for scholars.

Regarding the achievements of the three students in the field of artificial intelligence, Tang Xiaoou commented: "Wang Xiaogang sowed a lot of original seeds in the early years of the rise of deep learning Xi; He Kaiming laid a very solid and deep foundation for deep learning Xi; and Lin Dahua made it flourish through development and large models. ”

Tang Xiaoou also talked about his crisis about whether artificial intelligence will replace humans. He said that every night before going to bed, he listened to Mr. Yu Qian's cross talk, and at the same time thought: "How can a machine surpass such an interesting soul?" ”

At the end of this speech, Tang Xiaoou thanked Shanghai, thanked his students, and quoted a line from Yu Qian, an "interesting soul" that he believes is difficult for AI to surpass, in the movie "Good Teacher": "I didn't meet you at the best time, but I met you to have the best time." ”