A double alumnus of HKUST, Jianxiong – or Professor X as his students in Princeton call him, due to difficulty in pronouncing his Chinese name Xiao Jianxiong – completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and went on to become an Assistant Professor in Princeton. There, he also became the Founding Director of the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab. Then in 2016, Professor X left his promising academic career at Princeton to start his own business venture, AutoX, a high-tech startup that aims to make autonomous driving universally accessible to everyone.
AutoX is the frontrunner of RoboTaxi in China, with the mission of ‘Democratizing Autonomy’ to accelerate the advent of fully driverless cars. The company’s self-driving platform is capable of handling the most challenging and dynamic traffic scenarios in urban cities around the world. AutoX operates the largest size of RoboTaxi fleet in China, including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing. AutoX is the first and right now the only company in China operating a fully driverless RoboTaxi service on public roads without any safety driver. AutoX also obtained the World's second driverless RoboTaxi permit from California. Headquartered in Shenzhen, AutoX has the largest autonomous driving engineering team in China, with five R&D centers globally.
With more than ten years of research and engineering experience in Computer Vision, Autonomous Driving, and Robotics under his belt, Professor X is a pioneer in the fields of 3D Deep Learning, RGB-D Recognition and Mapping, Big Data, Large-scale Crowdsourcing, and Deep Learning for Robotics. His work received the Best Student Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2012 and the Google Research Best Papers Award for 2012, and has appeared in the popular press. He was awarded the Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Vision in 2012, the MIT CSW Best Research Award in 2011, NSF/Intel VEC Research Award in 2016, and two Google Faculty Awards in 2014 and in 2015 respectively. He co-led the MIT+Princeton joint team to participate in the Amazon Picking Challenge in 2016, and won 3rd and 4th place worldwide.
In 2017, Professor X was named in the MIT Technology Review's Innovators 35 Under 35 List, which recognizes the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. He was one out of only five entrepreneurs to receive this recognition this year, and AutoX is the first and only self-driving car company selected in the history of this list.
Most recently, the AutoX team started the AutoX TechBlog to share new progresses in their technology and business with the rest of the world.
Know more about Professor X from:
Sohu.com - July 24, 2017
Update date: August 2017