Song-Chun Zhu

Song-Chun Zhu is a leading computer vision and AI researcher who left the University of California, Los Angeles, to return to China in August 2020, going on to hold professorships at both Peking University and Tsinghua University while Beijing authorities funded his newly founded Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, where he serves as founding director.

Born in 1968 in Ezhou, Hubei province, Zhu earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1996 and joined UCLA's faculty in 2002 after earlier roles at Stanford and Ohio State. He won the Marr Prize, one of computer vision's highest honors, and in 2004 co-founded the Lotus Hill Institute in his hometown to build large-scale datasets for AI systems, later shutting it down in 2010 after concluding that data alone could not create true intelligence.

Since returning to China, Zhu has reportedly received several hundred million dollars in research funding. Asked by his longtime friend and Harvard classmate Mark Nitzberg whether he was certain about the move, Zhu replied: "They are giving me resources that I could never get in the United States. If I want to make this system that I have in my mind, then this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have to do it." In a proposal to Chinese policymakers, Zhu described advanced AI as "the strategic commanding heights of international scientific and technological competition in the next 10 to 20 years," comparing its potential impact to "the atomic bomb in the information technology field."