South China Morning Post
Sat, December 16, 2023
Tang Xiao'ou, the Chinese University of Hong Kong professor who turned his computer science laboratory into a multibillion dollar business and leader in artificial intelligence called SenseTime, has died. He was 55.
Tang passed away at close to midnight on December 15 after succumbing to an illness, according to a Saturday announcement by SenseTime in its official WeChat account, without disclosing the nature of his illness.
As a "pioneer in China's AI industry", Tang will continue to serve as an inspiration for others, the company said, turning its corporate website including its red logo into a black-and-white colour scheme as a sign of mourning.
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SenseTime's corporate mission - set out by Tang - to create a better AI-empowered future through innovation "will inspire everybody to ascend to the top and complete his unfinished business", the company added.
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Tang, who taught information engineering at CUHK, founded SenseTime in 2014 with a group of computer scientists including Xu Li, an alumnus of the university and the company's current CEO.
He was born in Liaoning province in northeastern China in 1968. He received his bachelor's degree in 1990 from the University of Science and Technology of China, located in the Anhui provincial capital of Hefei in eastern China. He moved to the US to further his education, receiving a master's degree from the University of Rochester in 1991 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996.
With research interests spanning computer vision, pattern recognition and video processing, Tang worked as the group manager of the Visual Computing Group at the Microsoft Research Asia from 2005 to 2008.
His academic career at the Chinese University (CUHK) began in 1998. During his tenure, he mentored many accomplished engineers and computer scientists who would go on to spur China's lead in facial recognition, pattern recognition and many applications in artificial intelligence.
One of his students, Wang Xiaogang, was so taken by Tang's demonstration of a computer algorithm that mimicked artistic styles, that he embarked on a career path that would turn him into a SenseTime co-founder and one of China's foremost experts on AI, he said during a 2021 interview with the Post.
SenseTime's rapid growth over the past decade led to it being referred to as one of China's "four little dragons" of AI, along with Cloudwalk Technology, Megvii and Yitu.
It went public in Hong Kong in December 2021. The company's Chinese name Shangtang is an amalgam of the character representing China's earliest imperial dynasty, with Tang's surname.
Tang was SenseTime's largest shareholder, holding 20.63 per cent of the company with 68.28 per cent of its voting rights, according to SenseTime's interim report in September. With a net worth of US$2.5 billion, he was listed by Forbes as the 33rd richest person in Hong Kong in February.
SenseTime develops AI technology for applications ranging from autonomous driving to augmented reality and medical imaging. The company has also been doubling down on the development and application of large language models, the technology underpinning OpenAI's ChatGPT, amid a heated race among Chinese tech giants to come up with their own generative AI products.
SenseTime's meteoric rise ran into trouble in 2019 when the US Commerce Department placed the company on its Entity List, alongside more than 20 other Chinese firms, for its alleged role in human rights abuses in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang, where a United Nations committee has said as many as 1 million members of the predominantly Muslim Uygur ethnic group were detained in "re-education centres".
Companies on the blacklist are prohibited from doing business with American companies without a licence.
SenseTime shares rose 3.3 per cent to close at HK$1.26 (16 US cents) on Friday in Hong Kong. It has lost nearly two-thirds of its price since its shares were listed in 2021 through an initial public offering.
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