In a homecoming for Hong Kong’s artificial intelligence community, Cao Liangliang – former principal engineer and director at Google DeepMind and architect of foundational AI systems at Google, Apple and IBM – has returned to the city after a two-decade absence.
His appointment last week as chair professor of data science and artificial intelligence at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) completes an intellectual boomerang trajectory that began under mentor
Tang Xiao’ouat the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003.
From Cao’s early work at Tang’s pioneering Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab), from which the AI company SenseTime emerged, to leading roles shaping Silicon Valley’s most advanced AI – including Gemini, Apple Intelligence and Vision Pro – he has built global influence in machine learning.
“Returning to Hong Kong is a full-circle moment for me,” Cao said on his personal website.
Born in Donggang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, Cao was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), a leading Chinese science and technology institution, in 1998. When he graduated in 2003, he met Tang, who had come to USTC to recruit students.
Tang, a PhD graduate of MIT, returned to Hong Kong to teach in the department of information engineering at CUHK in 1998. Before his death in 2023, Tang recruited top USTC graduates to join MMLab, many of whom have since become prominent figures in China’s AI industry.
Cao received his master’s degree from MMLab in 2005 and worked there as a research assistant until 2006, when he moved to the United States to pursue his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Thomas S. Huang. Huang, who died in 2020, was known as the “father of Chinese computer vision”.
Cao received top-tier training in AI and computer vision at UIUC. In 2010, he placed first in the ImageNet competition organised by
Li Fei-Fei, who is now a tenured professor at Stanford.