AI expert Guo-Jun Qi leaves US for China

Award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur Guo-Jun Qi has joined Westlake University in Hangzhou after a decade-long career in the United States.

The 43-year-old Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers fellow and distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery is now a full-time faculty member at Westlake’s School of Engineering, where he leads the Machine Perception and Learning (MAPLE) Lab, according to a university social media post.

A former Microsoft researcher and chief AI scientist at Huawei Research USA, Qi now heads a team of 20 researchers to explore AI and deep learning for image, video and virtual environment generation.

“I was drawn to the free-spirited atmosphere at Westlake University and wanted to come back and pursue something I truly wanted to do,” the Chinese-born expert said in an interview with the university.

Qi earned a bachelor’s degree in automation from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2005. He later obtained two PhDs – one from USTC in 2009 and another from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2012.

During his doctoral studies, Qi won several prestigious awards, including the Microsoft Fellowship, IBM Fellowship and the award for best paper at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Multimedia – a leading event in the field.

  

​Read More