SenseTime

SenseTime (Chinese: 商汤科技) is currently the world's most valuable artificial intelligence (AI) company.[2][3] It is established in Hong Kong with additional offices across China, Singapore, Japan, Abu Dhabi and the United States. The company has a portfolio of 700 clients and partners, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Qualcomm, Honda, Alibaba, Weibo, and more. It was the world's first Artificial intelligence unicorn and is valued at over $7.7 billion.[4][5][6]

SenseTime
TypePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
FoundedOctober 2014 (October 2014)
FounderTang Xiao'ou, Xu Li
HeadquartersScience Park, Hong Kong[1]
Area served
Computer vision, deep learning, face recognition, object detection, autonomous driving, smart cities, mobile apps, fintech, education
Websitesensetime.com
SenseTime
Simplified Chinese商汤科技
Traditional Chinese商湯科技

The company develops AI technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing for a variety of industries from healthcare to finance, online entertainment to education, retail to security, smart cities to smartphones, and more.[7]

In 2019, the company was placed on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List for using its technology for human rights abuses on Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities.[8][9]

History

2014

SenseTime was co-founded in October 2014 by Tang Xiao'ou, a professor of the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and computer scientist Xu Li, among others.[10] Tang is also the founder of CUHK's Multimedia Laboratory, the only representative from Asia to make it onto Nvidia's 2016 Top 10 Leading AI Labs list.[11] The CUHK-SenseTime Joint Lab has published and presented more than 400 computer vision papers in the world's top academic journals and conferences, second only to Microsoft. During 2014, SenseTime unveiled its face recognition algorithms, DeepID, which was the first computer vision algorithm to have better detection accuracy than human eyes, ahead of Facebook.[12]

2015

During 2015, many of SenseTime's papers were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). A total of 9 papers were recognized, all within the first year of SenseTime's inception.[13]

2016

In 2016, SenseTime increased the amount of its selected papers up to 16 in the CVPR Conference, and during this year's ImageNet competition, the company won first place in the object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis.[14][15]

2017

SenseTime set a record for the highest round of financing in the global AI industry: Series B raised US$410 million. It was during this time that a total of 43 publications were recognized by the CVPR and the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).[16][17] This number ranked first within Asia and even surpassed those numbers of Google and Facebook for that year.

SenseTime also saw many additional partnerships with global industry leaders and major municipalities. In October of that year, Qualcomm worked with SenseTime.[18] The following month, the Shanghai Municipal Government signed a strategic alliance agreement with SenseTime.[19] In December 2017, Honda and SenseTime signed a collaboration agreement.[20]

2018

In February 2018, SenseTime and MIT announced the creation of a programme to further advance AI research. The programme was cancelled by MIT in 2020 following revelations of SenseTime's involvement in the persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities.[21]

In April 2018, Series C financing amounted to US$600 million, which was then followed up immediately in the next month by a Series C+ round of US$620 million.[22]

In the same month, SenseTime, Alibaba, and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) partnered together to form a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab in Hong Kong. The “HKAI Lab” is aimed to “advance the frontiers of AI” and make Hong Kong one of the global hubs for AI. Preliminary funding for start-ups will be provided by Alibaba while SenseTime will offer access to its deep-learning resources.[23] The following month, SenseTime debuted in Singapore by signing a collaborative memorandum of understanding with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore and Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel). The ceremony was held on 29 June 2018 in Singapore and aimed to promote the advancement of AI within Singapore. NTU hopes to develop its own “smart campus,” and SingTel will apply SenseTime technology to their retail platforms and solutions.[24] In August of that same summer, SenseTime launched its first ever North American smart health lab in New Jersey.[25]

On 20 September 2018, SenseTime was named as China's National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision.[26]

2019

SenseTime became the first company in the world to join MIT's Quest for Intelligence campaign, a cross-disciplinary project hoping to leverage the capabilities of artificial intelligence.[27]

In September 2018, SenseTime became one of the founding members of the Global Artificial Intelligence Academic Alliance (GAIAA), along with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Sydney, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, and 7 other universities. The formation was officially announced at the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai and aspires to be the primary channel for streamlined information exchanges and collaboration amongst the top AI research institutions in the world.[28]

SenseTime has a large high-performance computing network which supports its development and fielding of AI applications. According to a report by Gregory C. Allen of the Center for a New American Security, SenseTime's computing network includes "54,000,000 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) cores across 15,000 GPUs within 12 GPU clusters."[29]

SenseTime is, as of 27 November 2019, leading a committee tasked with developing a standard for facial recognition in China.[30]

Services

SenseTime is an algorithm provider for several industries pertaining to artificial intelligence, including smart cities, smartphones, mobile Internet, online entertainment, automobiles, finance, retail, education, and real estate.

The company currently has more than 700 global customers, partners, and alliances, including Alibaba, Suning, China Mobile, UnionPay, Wanda, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Weibo, and iFLYTEK.[31] The company has also established joint laboratories and/or conducted joint research projects with the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Zhejiang University.

Controversies

SenseTime set up a 'smart policing' company with Leon, a major supplier of data analysis and surveillance technology in Xinjiang, in November 2017.[32] SenseTime's AI software was used in the development of facial recognition systems, for use by the Chinese government.[33] In April 2019 SenseTime sold out of the security venture.[32]

SenseTime's facial recognition technology has been deployed in the expansive surveillance and detainment program of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities.[34][35]

References
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  2. "China's SenseTime, the world's highest-valued AI startup, closes $620M follow-on round". Archived from the original on 21 July 2018. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
  3. Marr, Bernard. "Meet The World's Most Valuable AI Startup: China's SenseTime". Forbes. Retrieved 27 September 2020.
  4. "China's SenseTime Raises $620 Million". Reuters. 31 May 2018. Archived from the original on 28 March 2019. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  5. "China unicorns' valuations slide as virus-fearing investors seek early exits". Reuters. 15 April 2020. Archived from the original on 22 April 2020. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
  6. "Hong Kong's SenseTime Considers $1 Billion Capital Raise". The Wall Street Journal. 15 May 2020.
  7. "Meet The World's Most Valuable AI Startup: China's SenseTime". Forbes. 17 June 2019.
  8. Donnan, Shawn; Leonard, Jenny (7 October 2019). "U.S. Blacklists Eight Chinese Tech Companies on Rights Violations". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on 10 May 2020. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  9. Swanson, Ana; Mozur, Paul (7 October 2019). "U.S. Blacklists 28 Chinese Entities Over Abuses in Xinjiang". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
  10. "Xu Li". Fortune. 19 July 2018. Archived from the original on 21 July 2018. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
  11. "Pioneer in Research on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning". 23 August 2016. Archived from the original on 28 March 2019. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
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  14. "CVPR 2016 Open Access". Archived from the original on 5 December 2018. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
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  34. ""Eradicating Ideological Viruses" | China's Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang's Muslims". Human Rights Watch. 9 September 2018.
  35. Swanson, Ana; Mozur, Paul (7 October 2019). "U.S. Blacklists 28 Chinese Entities Over Abuses in Xinjiang". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 21 June 2020.
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