Li Hongzhi, an award-winning former head of GenAI at Microsoft Asia, has joined Tongji University, one of China’s leading universities.

Li started his first job at technology giant Microsoft immediately after obtaining his PhD from Columbia University.

For more than 10 years, he worked at Microsoft Research – the company’s subsidiary responsible for basic and applied research in computer science, software engineering and hardware design.

Li was the head of Microsoft AI Asia’s GenAI Group before joining Tongji.

According to the university, Li recently returned to China and is a distinguished tenured professor at its Institute of AI for Engineering.

The South China Morning Post has contacted Li for comment.

He earned his PhD in computer science in 2016. Before that, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Zhejiang University in 2010 and Columbia in 2012.

While at Columbia, Li won the Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2012, a global conference on multimedia research.

The ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge highlights practical, real-world multimedia problems posed by industry and academia, challenging researchers to benchmark their AI, streaming and vision algorithms on common data sets and platforms.

After obtaining his PhD, Li joined Microsoft Research headquarters in Washington state. Over the 10-plus years he worked there, he gradually rose through the ranks.

He previously held positions as principal researcher and principal architect, as well as principal applied science manager.

His research interests focused on machine intelligence, including multimodal content analysis and cloud computing.

Li co-authored the influential paper “Rethinking Classification and Localisation for Object Detection”, which has proved foundational in the field of computer vision and been cited more than 1,000 times.

Published in 2020, the paper proposed the “double-head method” to solve the distinct requirements of classification and localisation in artificial intelligence.

The method refers to a strategy of using two specialised “heads” or mechanisms to handle different parts of a complex task simultaneously.

At Tongji, Li’s boss is Hua Xiansheng, executive dean of the university’s Institute of AI for Engineering.

Hua worked at Microsoft Research as well for more than 14 years.

According to its official website, the Institute of AI for Engineering at Tongji is a newly established top AI research institution in Shanghai.

Its core concept focuses on “AI4E (AI for engineering)” and it aims to make breakthroughs in important technologies for foundational models and intelligent agents in engineering.