Introduction

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)-JD AI Joint Laboratory is a joint school-enterprise laboratory established by the CUHKSZ and JD AI Research.

The joint laboratory will be chaired by Professor Shuguang Cui, Executive Dean of School of Science and Engineering, CUHKSZ, and Dr. Xiaodong He, Executive Vice Director of the JD AI Research Institute. The joint lab will rely on the international first-class talents and academic research advantages of CUHKSZ and the R&D and industrial application advantages of the JD, to jointly train doctoral students and carry out research work. The doctoral students are jointly guided by the faculties of CUHKSZ and JD, aiming at the real research frontiers. Dr. Bowen Zhou, Dr. Xiaodong He, Dr. Tao Mei and Dr. Jinfeng Yi from JD will serve as joint advisors. The joint laboratory will undertake scientific research projects and apply for national/state research funding, solve important problems in the field of artificial intelligence.

The joint laboratory is financially independent, and the funding for the doctoral students is provided by JD. JD will provide internship opportunities for the doctoral students. Eligible graduates will be awarded a Ph.D. degree from CUHKSZ. The joint lab will also recruit postdocs worldwide.

The cultivation of high-end artificial intelligence talents requires basic accumulation and practice. The CUHKSZ, as an international research university, has made great progress in talent recruiting, scientific research and industrial incubation after four years of development. It has made high impacts in the areas of robotics, smart manufacturing, and big data. In terms of talent recruiting, CUHKSZ has attracted top-ranking faculty members from all around the world. Most of the faculty members are well-known professors and scholars from world-class universities, including many Nobel laureates and academicians, who will satisfy the development needs of the emerging industries in the country and the Pearl River Delta region, especially in the scientific research fields such as robotics, smart manufacturing, big data, and information science. The university has established the National-Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Robot and Intelligent Manufacturing, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data (SRIBD), Shenzhen Finance Institute, Robot Institute of CUHKSZ, three Nobel Prize laureate institutes (Ciechanover Institute of Precision and Regenerative Medicine, Kobilka Institute of Innovative Drug Discovery, and Arieh Warshel Institute of Computational Biology) and a Turing Award scientist laboratory (Hopcroft Institute for Advanced Study in Information Sciences). In 2018, the university also established The Institute for Data and Decision Analytics, focusing on interdisciplinary research in operations research, statistics, operations management, and decision science. The institute will work closely with the existing three schools of the university to provide impetus for the growth of digital technology in the future.

JD AI Research focuses on continuous algorithm innovation and closely integrates JD's actual business scenarios to lead the industry upgrade, with focusing areas as: NLP, voice, computer vision, machine learning (including deep learning and reinforcement learning). They have research centers in Beijing and Silicon Valley, and will continue to set up research centers in the United Kingdom and other European regions. With JD's massive and rich data-sets and very clear application scenarios, as well as the recent joining of core talents, JD AI Research will focus on improving AI in various fields including smart consumption, smart supply, intelligent logistics, financial technology, physical retail technology and so on.

JD AI Research emphasizes the complementary research and application. The basic research focuses on computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning. It has won excellent rankings in various international competitions. Their research papers have also been accepted by the top international academic conferences. For example, the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory of JD AI Research stood out in CVPR 2018 "Look Into Person" International Competition with two championships in the single and multiplayer human pose estimation section and one runner-up in the single human pose analysis unit. Five papers of JD AI scientists were accepted by NAACL, the top conference for natural language processing. The application of technology focuses on the three core businesses of retail e-commerce, finance, and logistics. JD has not only launched many products such as JD Intelligent Identification System and JD JIMI Intelligent Robot, but also developed the artificial intelligence open platform Neuhub.

We believe that the CUHKSZ-JD AI Joint Laboratory based in Shenzhen, will conduct research on international academic frontiers and cutting-edge core technologies, jointly train high-caliber talents, become a powerful engine, and produce high impact scientific research results in the future.