What I know about Zhang Lei: an MSRA algorithm race and half the Chinese AI scene
What happened
In 2002, Microsoft Research Asia held an internal competition for face-detection algorithms. Zhang Lei, less than two years out of his PhD, led interns Xiao Rong, Zhu Long, Chen Longbin, and others in reducing the false-positive rate from 'one false alarm for every positive' to 1% in three months, beating the team of face-recognition expert Li Ziqing. Their approach was eventually integrated into Windows. During 20 years at Microsoft, Zhang also built a celebrity-recognition system that could identify 200,000 people with 99% accuracy and released the MS Celeb dataset. OpenAI later drew on its image-text matching approach when training the 400-million-example CLIP model.
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