Yin Qi

Overview

Yin Qi is a Chinese entrepreneur in artificial intelligence and computer vision. He co-founded the facial-recognition company Megvii with Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu after graduating from Tsinghua University, and later became chairman of Qianli Technology, formerly Lifan Technology, where his focus shifted to smart automotive technology.^[2] His career tracks two stages of applied AI: the commercialisation of face recognition in cameras and other devices, and the movement of AI into vehicles.

Education and early research

Yin Qi was admitted to Tsinghua University's automation department in 2006 and graduated in 2010 from the Computer Science Experimental Class, known as the Yao Class.^[1] The Yao Class is an experimental undergraduate programme in computer science, and it has become one of the routes through which students enter AI research in China.

He began his AI research during an internship at Microsoft Research Asia.^[1] In 2011, while an intern, he built what was then the world's most accurate face recognition system and published it at that year's CVPR conference.^[1] Face recognition is the task of taking an image of a face and deciding which identity it belongs to; the accuracy of such systems is usually compared against other systems on shared test sets, which is what a claim of "most accurate" refers to at a given moment. CVPR — the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition — is one of the main academic venues in computer vision, so a paper there puts the work in front of the research community.

He then went to Columbia University to pursue a PhD in visual sensor design under professor Shree Nayar, and ended the PhD early in 2013 to return to China as Megvii's CEO.^[1]

Building Megvii

Megvii was established in 2011 to commercialize facial recognition technology.^[2] Yin Qi co-founded it with Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu after graduating from Tsinghua.^[2] Two years later he ended his doctoral study and came back to lead the company as chief executive.^[1] A chief executive runs day-to-day operations and reports to the board — a division of roles that matters as a research-heavy startup turns into a company with customers and investors.

In October 2017, Megvii announced a US$460 million Series C round led by China State-Owned Capital Venture Investment Fund, with Ant Financial and Foxconn as strategic investors.^[1] A Series C round is a later-stage venture financing round, coming after the earlier seed and early-stage rounds; strategic investors are companies that invest for reasons beyond pure financial return, typically because they have, or want, a commercial relationship with the company being funded.

Recognition

In January 2018, MIT Technology Review named him to its China list of 35 innovators under 35. The citation pointed to his founding of Megvii and to his work integrating face recognition into front-end hardware such as cameras.^[1] Front-end hardware means devices that sit where the data is generated, capturing and sometimes processing it on the spot; a camera is the obvious example, and it is where a recognition algorithm meets the physical world.

Toward smart vehicles

Later he became chairman of Qianli Technology, formerly Lifan Technology, shifting his focus to smart automotive technology.^[2] A chairman leads the board rather than daily operations, setting strategy and overseeing management — a role that in the automotive case places him at the point where AI software meets a manufacturing industry.