Exclusive | SenseTime parlays academic bona fides in facial recognition, image processing into world’s largest artificial intelligence platform
- A group of professors at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) nurtured a start-up into the world’s largest AI unicorn in seven years
- SenseTime appointed HSBC and CICC to lead a Hong Kong stock offer estimated at US$2 billion
A masters student in electronic engineering in 2001, Wang was visiting a laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) when his engineering dean Tang Xiao’ou showed how deep neural networks in computing could teach algorithms to mimic artistic techniques, transforming his photograph into a portrait with the signature styles of Claude Monet or Vincent van Gogh.
“It was eye-popping,” Wang said in an interview this week with the South China Morning Post from Shanghai. “I was a layman in AI” who had never seen anything like that before, he said.
The experience switched on his lifelong fascination with pattern recognition and machine learning, propelling him to complete a doctorate in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and eventually to patent the technology for turning photographs into portraits. With his academic peers, Wang – who remains a professor at CUHK – co-founded SenseTime in 2014, turning the start-up into an AI powerhouse valued at US$8 billion according to data provided by Crunchbase.
