Yangqing Jia

Yangqing Jia is currently serving as VP of Alibaba Inc., and President of the Alibaba Cloud's Computing Platform business unit. Jia focuses on building cloud based big data and AI platforms, and serving public and private cloud clients. Alibaba Cloud is the biggest cloud provider in China and a leading figure globally, with Alibaba's own business running on it.

Before Alibaba, Jia was a director of engineering at Facebook, where he initiated the effort of building Facebook's general-purpose, large-scale AI platform from the ground up for all of Facebook's applications. The system serves as the backbone of Facebook AI products, such as ranking, computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, mobile AI, and AR.

Before Facebook, Jia was a research scientist at Google Brain, where he worked on computer vision, deep learning, and the TensorFlow framework. Together with colleagues, he built GoogLeNet, the first neural network to break human image classification accuracy.

Jia obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. During his graduate study he interned at the National University of Singapore, Microsoft Research Asia, NEC Labs America, and Google Research. Jia obtained his bachelor and master degrees from Tsinghua University, China.

Jia has a track record of creating and contributing to open source libraries. In particular, he has been an active figure in the recent years' AI software stack designs: he's the creator of Caffe, which is now a BVLC maintained, open-source deep learning framework. He's worked on the TensorFlow project at Google Brain. Recently, he created and led the Caffe2 and ONNX efforts. Caffe2 is one of the first deep learning frameworks to simultaneously provide high-performance AI capability on all major platforms (Cloud CPU/GPU, mobile CPU/GPU, embedded systems, etc.), and ONNX is an open standard for neural networks across the industry, creating collaboration among major players such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Qualcomm, ARM, and many more. Although Jia codes less nowadays, he still serves as a humble contributor to the open source community with full heart.

Jia's major interest is on the design and evolution of AI hardware and software stack, joining the cutting edge research with the conventional wisdom of computer science. Solutions Jia created have been widely adopted by the industry, some serving as the de-facto standard of various hardware and software.