Sources Say Senior Principal Research Manager Wang Jingdong Left Microsoft Research Asia and May Join Baidu

Several individuals familiar with the matter have told Chinese media outlet Leiphone that Wang Jingdong, Senior Principal Research Manager with the Visual Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia, has left his position. People predict that Wang may now be preparing to join Baidu.

First, Professor Yang Ruigang, former Director and chief scientist for 3D computer vision of Baidu‘s Robot and Autonomous Driving Laboratory, joined Inceptio Technology, an autonomous driving truck technology and operating company, as CTO at the beginning of last year, so the position at Baidu has been vacant.

Secondly, Xiao Jianxiong, the founder of AutoX, who had studied at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) as Wang had, is quite successful in the field of self-driving. This provides an opportunity for Wang to enter the field of self-driving.

Wang Jingdong’s research in computer vision, especially visual perception, is very extensive, including fields such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, image classification, target detection and others, all of which are very important perception functions for autonomous driving.

In addition, some people in the industry have predicted that Wang Jingdong’s profound 3D visual research background might lead him to Baidu Research, where he can play an important role in the firm’s innovative projects such as Metaverse and AR/VR.

Wang Jingdong obtained a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He also won the Tsinghua University Outstanding Thesis Award during his master’s education. In 2007, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, then joined Microsoft Research Asia in the same year.

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After joining Microsoft, Wang Jingdong gradually rose from the position of researcher to Senior Principal Research Manager, publishing more than 200 papers.

Wang Jingdong’s research fields include neural architecture design, human posture estimation, semantic segmentation, image classification, target detection, large-scale indexing and salient target detection.

Wang is an outstanding member of ACM and an IAPR Fellow. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE TPAMI and IEEE TCSVT. According to Google Academic, the total citations of his papers is 23,950, with an h-index of 69.