China’s top AI scientist Yang Hongxia joins Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This move is part of the government’s ongoing efforts to transform the city into a technology hub.

One of China’s most notable female figures working in AI, Yang joined ByteDance’s applied machine learning team in 2023. She was based in Seattle, where she reported to Liang Xiang, who led the development of the Doubao large language model. Yang left ByteDance in May to start her own AI-related project, according to Chinese tech news outlet 36Kr.

Before joining ByteDance, Yang worked at Alibaba’s Damo Academy, which she joined in 2013. She played a crucial role in developing the 10-trillion-parameter M6 multimodal model, which is considered the predecessor to Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen model. Alibaba owns Post.

Her other positions include research at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center and chief scientist at Yahoo!, and associate professor at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of Zhejiang University.

Yang received her bachelor’s degree in statistics from Nankai University in Tianjin, a port city in northern China, and her PhD from Duke University in North Carolina. She has authored more than 100 papers for top conferences and journals and holds more than 50 patents in the U.S. and China.

Chinese tech giants have seen some of their AI professionals return to academia or join China’s emerging AI startup scene, as the country races to catch up with the US.