Tang Xiao’ou, Co-Founder and former Chairman of SenseTime, was one of the pioneering figures behind China’s rise as a global leader in computer vision and AI. Born in 1968, Tang earned a PhD in computer vision from MIT in 1996 before joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as a professor of information engineering, where he also served as associate dean of engineering. In 2001, he founded CUHK’s Multimedia Laboratory, which became a hub for advanced computer vision research and, eventually, the birthplace of SenseTime.
In 2014, Tang co-founded SenseTime alongside two of his PhD students, Xu Li and Xu Bing, spinning technology developed in his university lab into a commercial company. That same year, the team unveiled DeepID, a facial recognition model that surpassed human-level accuracy — a milestone that helped establish SenseTime as one of the most prominent AI companies to emerge from Chinese academia. Under Tang’s research leadership, SenseTime expanded into deep learning, autonomous driving, and large-scale AI models, eventually listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2021.
Throughout his career, Tang remained deeply embedded in the academic community, continuing to teach AI-related courses even as SenseTime grew into a multibillion-dollar public company. He was honored with the Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, served as programme chair and later general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, and was recognized as an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the field.
Tang passed away in December 2023 at the age of 55, following an unspecified illness. At the time of his death, his stake in SenseTime had made him a billionaire, with SenseTime paying tribute to him as a foundational figure in China’s AI industry. Colleagues and successors, including current SenseTime CEO Xu Li, have continued to build on the research foundation and vision he established — one centered on advancing computer vision technology to serve a “better AI-empowered future.”
