Dr. Li Xu (徐立) is the co-founder and CEO of Sensetime Group Limited (商汤科技), a company that aims to use computer technologies to change the world. It is an artificial intelligence company that develops facial and image recognition technology, which could be used in anything from surveillance to self-driving cars. Founded in Hong Kong, the company has offices throughout China, Japan, Singapore, and the U.S.
After a new funding round by Jack Ma’s retail giant Alibaba, the company has now been valued at $4.5 billion. It one of the highest valued AI companies in the world. The business has clients from a variety of markets from FinTech to the Chinese government.
Li comes with over 10 years of experience in research and product development in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing. He has both a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and engineering from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University as well as a doctorate from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The Sensetime CEO also worked as a research scholar for Microsoft and led the imaging and sensing group at Lenovo’s image and visual computing lab before switching to the AI giant.