SenseTime The Faces Behind China's Artificial Intelligence Unicorn скачать в хорошем качестве

SenseTime The Faces Behind China's Artificial Intelligence Unicorn

This story appears in the March 30, 2018 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe to Forbes AsiaIt's common now to read of the Chinese government's push to lead the world in applications of artificial intelligence. But, in fact, many of the greatest gains are the result of key individual actions and intersections over many years. Take the case of SenseTime, a standout in facial-recognition technology and, by virtue of an implied capitalization it says exceeds $3 billion, China's largest AI unicorn. SenseTime's creation begins with Tang Xiaoou's Ph. D. in computer vision from MIT in 1996, which led to a teaching post at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Busy in the same engineering department there was Xu Li, en route to his own doctorate in computer vision and imaging in 2010. (Computer vision is software for recognizing images.)The two formed part of the nucleus of what became SenseTime a few years later, with Xu as CEO. One of Tang's students at the school, Xu Bing, today spearheads the company's fundraising and strategic partnerships. And when Tang took a sabbatical from the university in 2008 to head a computer-vision group at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, he met Yang Fan, now SenseTime's head of product development. "It took me a couple of years to find out what I really liked to work on at MIT. Then it took more than 20 years of hard work in this area such that we finally start to see some real industrial applications and impacts. It does not happen overnight," Tang, now 49, writes in an email. It also took investors to give the group a critical boost. Justin Niu, a partner at venture capital firm IDG in Beijing, in 2014 visited professor Tang and his research team, still working out of the same university lab. They showed him demos of how a camera enhanced by machine learning could pull distinct faces out of a smoggy day's tableau in Tiananmen Square."Their techniques are quite shocking to me. I realized how far the progress had been in the field," Niu recalls. IDG joined with another firm, StarVC, to lead a $30 million investment into the formative SenseTime as Tang was processing the company's registration paperwork. The professor and his founding group, by then numbering ten and all at least a decade his junior, parked themselves a few miles away in Hong Kong's Science Park. Yang Fan added a contingent from his base, Tsinghua University. In 2014, a series of technology breakthroughs won SenseTime global acclaim from publications such as Nature and Science and other media attention before IDG came calling. These included a research paper showing its computing capability, the world's first to outperform human vision under certain conditions, and its claim of beating Facebook's DeepFace with its algorithms called DeepID. Fast-forward to 2018, after stakes were taken by other Chinese VCs and private corporations, and by Qualcomm of the U. S. SenseTime's workforce numbers 1,500, with five mainland hubs added to the Hong Kong site. All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shuching... #sensetime #newsusa #usnewsworldreport#usanewstoday #newstodayfox #newstodayinusa #