According to an announcement by AI company SenseTime on WeChat, Mr. Tang died at midnight on December 15 due to illness. Sense Time did not disclose the founder's illness.
Considered a pioneer in China’s AI industry, Mr. Tang will continue to be an inspiration for others to follow, SenseTime said in a statement. The company’s website has turned black and white in tribute to the professor.
SenseTime's mission, as set by Mr. Tang, is to create a better future based on the power of AI through creative innovation, and people will continue to "reach the top, complete the unfinished work" he said.
He taught information engineering at the University of Hong Kong and founded SenseTime in 2014 with a group of other computer scientists , including Xu Li, who is now the company's CEO.
Mr. Tang was born in 1968 in Liaoning Province, northeastern China. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1990. He then moved to the United States to continue his studies and received a Master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1991 and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996.
With a passion for research, including computer vision, pattern recognition and video processing, he became the manager of the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia from 2005 to 2008. Hiseducational career at the University of Hong Kong began in 1998.
During his tenure, he taught many engineers and computer scientists who would go on to fuel China's leadership in facial recognition, pattern recognition and other AI applications.
One of his students – Wang Xiaogang – later became co-CEO of SenseTime and one of China's leading AI experts.
SenseTime’s rapid growth over the past decade has seen it ranked among the four domestic AI “little dragons,” along with Cloudwalk Technology, Megvii and Yitu. The company listed in Hong Kong in December 2021.
Mr. Tang is SenseTime’s largest shareholder, holding 20.63% of the shares and 68.28% of the voting rights. With a net worth of $2.5 billion, he is the 33rd richest person in Hong Kong, according to Forbes magazine.
SenseTime develops AI technologies used in areas such as self-driving cars, augmented reality, and medical imaging. The company also focuses on developing and applying large language models, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT.
In 2019, the US Department of Commerce put SenseTime on the Entity List along with more than 20 other Chinese companies, prohibiting them from doing business with US companies without a license.
(According to SCMP)
Source
Comment (0)