FAST NEWS: Megvii Technology Chief Scientist Dead at 45

The latest: Sun Jian, the chief scientist and managing director of research at top China artificial intelligence (AI) company Megvii Technology Ltd., died at the age of 45 on June 14, the company said in an announcement.

Looking up: Megvii Technology is one of the few companies in the world to have a self-developed deep-learning framework and owns a leading computer-vision research institute. The company said in the announcement it will continue to follow Sun Jian’s research mission and “climb the scientific peak.”

Take Note: The death of Sun Jian, an expert in facial-recognition technology, will cast a shadow over the company’s research and development efforts.

Digging Deeper: Established in 2011, Megvii Technology was listed on the Entity List of trade restrictions by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2019, due to the controversial use of its technology in Xinjiang. The company also applied to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2019, but its application lapsed in February 2020. Sun Jian joined the company in 2016 and was responsible for its technical research and development work. Prior to that, he was a principal research manager at Microsoft Research Asia for 13 years, where his main focus was on computational photography, facial recognition and deep learning-based imaging.

Translation by Jony Ho

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