Hot topic | The battle for Chinese AI talent between BAT continues: the story of how former Amazon scientist Ren Xiaofeng joined Alibaba

The three domestic giants BAT seem to have a special liking for Chinese AI scientists. After former Microsoft executive Lu Qi was poached by Baidu, Alibaba also began to poach people from American technology giants, and its sights are on the e-commerce giant Amazon. According to the latest news from Leifeng.com, Ren Xiaofeng, the highest-ranking Chinese scientist at Amazon, announced that he would join Alibaba. With the persistent belief that the person Alibaba is interested in must be extraordinary, the editor of Leifeng.com has searched through Ren Xiaofeng's personal background.

It is understood that Ren Xiaofeng graduated from Zhejiang University in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in computer science. In 2000, he received a master's degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. His doctoral advisor was Professor Jitendra Malik of the Berkeley School, a well-known professor in the field of computer vision. The 26 students he supervised, including Ren Xiaofeng, were very influential in both academia and industry.

After graduating with a Ph.D., Ren Xiaofeng joined the Toyota Research Institute in Chicago, where he mainly conducted research on target tracking and human tracking, face detection and tracking, image segmentation, human posture analysis, motion and optical flow.

In 2008, he joined Intel Seattle Lab as a research scientist, and then went to Intel Lab Computer and Science Popularization Algorithm Center as a senior research scientist, mainly leading daily sensing projects, as well as the application of computer vision in activity recognition and monitoring, robotics and human-computer interaction. During the research period, he and others jointly pioneered two new directions in computer vision: RGB-D perception and egocentric vision, making target recognition, scene understanding, target pose estimation, and boundary detection the best in the industry. And built demonstrations of real-time target recognition, scene understanding, 3D modeling, augmented reality, and robotic sensing.

In 2013, he joined Amazon as Amazon Chief Scientist.

Between 2013 and 2017, Ren Xiaofeng became the project leader of Amazon Go. He used computer vision and machine learning to reinvent a new retail model and launched the world's first "just walk out" store. The "just walk out technology" was developed by Ren Xiaofeng and his team at the time. The principle is that after entering the supermarket, there will be facial recognition at the entrance, cameras on the shelves, infrared sensors and pressure sensors to determine which products the customer has selected and how many products have been put back, and the microphones in the store can determine the location of the consumer based on the ambient sound. All the collected information is transmitted to the information center of the Amazon Go store. When leaving the store, the sensor scans the products purchased by the customer and automatically settles the bill. There will be no delay throughout the process.

Ren Xiaofeng became famous for the Amazon Go store

Amazon Go 商店的成功，也让任小枫的名字出现在了普通大众消费者的眼前，这也是他当时职业生涯的顶峰时刻。可是，雷锋网发现除了 Amazon Go 的一些相关报道中提到过他，很少出现在别的新闻里。唯一出现频率较高的就是在各个计算机视觉大会上发表的论文，如 ECCV，CVPR，ICCV。他还曾担任过 CVPR、ICCV 的领域主席。据统计，他发表的相关论文被引用 9000 次以上。雷锋网编辑还在亚马逊上看到一本他合著的书： Consumer Depth Cameras for Computer Vision9 (用于计算机视觉的消费者深度相机)

Ren Xiaofeng's decision to join Alibaba was also kept low-key, and the media did not know about it until the last minute. Leifeng.com editors speculated that Alibaba was able to get an AI general as it wished, for the following reasons:

• Ren Xiaofeng's hometown is Hangzhou, where Alibaba's headquarters is located. He also graduated from Zhejiang University. It is inevitable that he has a close relationship with Alibaba.

• Alibaba and Amazon have similar backgrounds, and both are e-commerce giants. At the same time, Ren Xiaofeng's information shows that she is a Chinese citizen and a permanent resident of the United States. Naturally, she has a patriotic heart to help Chinese companies rise.

• Alibaba's iDST program is very international and does not have the chronic problems of Chinese companies. For someone who has worked in a foreign company for a long time, there may not be so much for him to adapt to.

On his personal website, he also seemed excited about joining Alibaba:

I am currently the Chief Scientist and Vice President of iDST (Institute of Data Science and Technology), Alibaba's global R&D center, and a pioneer in realizing NASA's program. We have a fast-growing department in Bellevue, so I will continue to stay in Seattle to recruit and build a world-class computer vision team.

Note: The current dean of iDST is Jin Rong, a tenured professor at Michigan State University. He has served as the area chair of top international conferences such as NIPS and SIGIR, and a member of the senior program committee of top conferences such as KDD, AAAI, and IJCAI. He has also won the NSF Career Award from the National Science Foundation of the United States.

In recent years, Alibaba has also begun to join the Silicon Valley AI talent war. Before Ren Xiaofeng, Leifeng.com reported that former Microsoft R&D partner Zhou Jingren had been recruited by Alibaba, but compared with Baidu's talent strategy, Alibaba does not have an advantage.

For reference: How are the 20 Chinese AI leaders divided up by BAT in the eyes of foreign media?

It is understood that in the past year, about 30% of Alibaba's new employees were technical talents from well-known overseas Internet companies. The latest "NASA" plan has allowed Alibaba to recruit AI scientists around the world regardless of cost. The following introduction will show how important iDST is to the realization of the "NASA" plan.

iDST relies on machine learning and deep learning technologies to create core AI technologies covering image and video, voice interaction, natural language understanding, and intelligent decision-making, fully empowering Alibaba Group's important businesses such as e-commerce, finance, logistics, social networking, and entertainment. The full coverage of AI technical service capabilities is exported to various industries through Alibaba Cloud, and we work together with enterprises to create an intelligent future.

Based on the above, Leifeng.com has reason to believe that Alibaba's employment strategy focuses more on the technical accumulation of the employees in the field and whether they can perfectly connect the previous technology to their own business development. Compared with the previous Chinese technology companies' crazy snatching of Silicon Valley stars, it is much more rational. It's still the old saying: the best one is the one that suits you.

When Leifeng.com started reporting, the news had already been finalized. Including Ren Xiaofeng, Alibaba has now recruited three generals, the following are the previous two:

Hua Xiansheng , IEEE Fellow, iDST Director, former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, was selected by MIT in 2008 as one of the 35 outstanding young innovators under 35 (MIT TR35).

Jingren Zhou is the Chief Scientist and Vice President of Alibaba Cloud. He is responsible for leading the team to conduct big data and artificial intelligence research at the Alibaba Cloud Data Science and Technology Research Institute, and promoting Alibaba's development of artificial intelligence technologies such as speech, natural language, image and video processing, and large-scale machine learning.

Prior to joining Alibaba, Zhou Jingren worked as an engineering manager at Microsoft, developing big data platforms to support Windows, Office, and Bing. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and a doctorate in computer science from Columbia University.