Google DeepMind director Cao Liangliang makes a boomerang-return to Hong Kong

In a homecoming for Hong Kong’s artificial intelligence community, Cao Liangliang – former principal engineer and director at Google DeepMind, IEEE Fellow and architect of foundational AI systems at Google, Apple and IBM – has returned to the city after a two-decade absence.

From Cao’s early work at Tang’s pioneering Multimedia Laboratory, from which the AI company SenseTime emerged, to leading roles shaping Silicon Valley’s most advanced AI – including Gemini, Apple Intelligence and Vision Pro – he has built global influence in machine learning that could energise Hong Kong’s academic ecosystem.

“Returning to Hong Kong is a full-circle moment for me,” Cao announced on his personal website.

Born in Donggang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, Cao was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), a leading Chinese science and technology institution, in 1998. When he graduated in 2003, he met Tang Xiao’ou, who had come to USTC to recruit students.

Tang, a PhD graduate of MIT, returned to Hong Kong to teach in the Department of Information Engineering at CUHK in 1998. Before his death in 2023, Tang recruited outstanding USTC graduates to join MMLab, many of whom have since become prominent figures in China’s AI industry.

Cao received his master’s degree from MMLab in 2005 and worked there as a research assistant until 2006, when he moved to the United States to pursue his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Thomas S. Huang. Huang, who died in 2020, was known as the “father of Chinese computer vision”.