Artificial intelligence expert Zhu Songchun to return to China from US
- UCLA professor’s move to Peking University comes as Beijing seeks to make country a global leader in the field
- Zhu’s role will include work to set up new institute in collaboration with the authorities
A leading Chinese artificial intelligence researcher in the US has returned to China as Beijing strives to become a global leader in the field.
Professor Zhu Songchun, an award-winning expert in computer vision at the University of California at Los Angeles, has joined Peking University to lead its Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the university said in a statement last Friday.
The university said it was working with Beijing city and the central government to set up a new and separate AI research institute in collaboration with other leading Chinese universities. Zhu will be involved in the setting up of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, but the statement did not give further details.
Born in 1968 in Ezhou, Hubei province, Zhu obtained his PhD at Harvard University in 1996 after graduating from the University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui province. He joined UCLA in 2002 after a brief stint at Stanford and Ohio State universities.
Zhu is an expert in computer vision, cognitive science and other interdisciplinary studies. At an AI conference held in Chengdu in May last year, Zhu said that “70 per cent of the human brain’s cerebral cortexes are used for processing vision. Research into computer vision opens the gateway to artificial intelligence.”
One year after he joined UCLA, he received the highest honour in computer vision, the Marr Prize, with other researchers for their study of the process of decomposing images into visual patterns, also known as image parsing.
