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.
A logo of SenseTime at the World artificial intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 6, 2023. Photo: Reuters. alt=A logo of SenseTime at the World artificial intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 6, 2023. Photo: Reuters.>
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.