Xu Li (computer scientist)


Xu Li is a co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime, an artificial intelligence company. Xu has led SenseTime since the company’s incorporation and helped it independently develop its proprietary deep learning platform.

Education and research

Xu received his doctorate in computer science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained both his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Xu has published more than 50 papers at international conferences and in journals in the field of computer vision and won the Best Paper Award at the international conference on Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation 2012 and the Best Reviewer Award at the international conferences Asian Conference on Computer Vision ACCV 2012 and International Conference on Computer Vision 2015. He has three algorithms that have been included into the visual open-source platform OpenCV, and his “L0 Smoothing” algorithm garnered the most citations in research papers over a span of five years within the ACM Transactions on Graphics, a scientific journal that Thomson Reuters InCites has placed first among software engineering journals.

Career

Previously, Xu worked at Lenovo Corporate Research & Development. He was also a visiting researcher at Motorola China R&D Institute, Omron Research Institute, and Microsoft Research.

Selected publications

Xu was ranked 7th in Fortune magazine’s 2018 edition of its 40 Under 40. He was also named “China’s Outstanding AI Industry Leader” by The Economic Observer, received the “Innovative Business Leader” Award under NetEase’s “Future Technology Talent Awards”, and was honored as Sina’s “2017 Top Ten Economic Figures”. In 2018, Xu was named EY’s “Entrepreneur of the Year China” in the Technology category.