The scientist on a mission to nurture AI talent in Hong Kong to promote academic exchange

 


Ma Yi remembers the long list of renowned Chinese researchers trained by Microsoft Research Asia, the US tech giant’s laboratory. Now as new head of the University of Hong Kong (HKU)’s computing school, the Chinese-born artificial intelligence (AI) scientist said he is trying to rebuild that nurturing environment, which creates opportunities for talent to shine.

In an interview with the Post on Thursday, the leader of the recently merged School of Computing and Data Science said he gave up his tenure at the University of California, Berkeley to take up his role in Hong Kong because he sees more that he can do in this part of the world. That includes grooming researchers.

“China does not lack talent … what it actually lacks is a mechanism to nurture them, to grow them,” said Ma, who has worked on both sides of the Pacific in a career spanning academia and industries. “We have the top talent, raw talent, but they need the right environment, the system, to grow.”

Ma is among a growing list of Chinese scientists returning from US institutions to serve in Hong Kong and the mainland, lending key support to China’s rising technology rivalry with the United States.

A 2000 doctoral graduate from UC Berkeley and a 1995 graduate from China’s Tsinghua University, Ma is one of the world’s most recognised AI experts. From 2000 to 2011, he served as a faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and briefly worked with Li Fei-fei, a Chinese-American computer scientist and AI pioneer at Stanford University.
From 2009 to 2014, Ma worked for Microsoft Research Asia with a group of researchers who later became leading figures in China’s AI industry. They include the late Tang Xiaoou, co-founder of AI software company SenseTime, and Wang Jian, chief technology officer at Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.

Following a stint at a Shanghai school, Ma returned to the US and joined the faculty of UC Berkeley in 2018. He then took a two-year sabbatical to move to Hong Kong to helm the data science institute at HKU.

Hong Kong is an ideal place to train AI talent because “academic independence” is respected here, and the city is on track to develop a hi-tech industry that can retain talents when they graduate from local institutions, according to Ma. Five of the city’s six universities are among the world’s top 50 institutions for data science and AI, with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology at the highest rank in 10th place, according to the 2024 QS World University Rankings by Subject.

Ma said he believes that talent is more important than software or hardware, which is “made by people”. “Talent is key … if you do not have the talent, you have nothing.”

The expert said he disagrees with the view that future AI development will continue to follow “scaling laws”, which suggest that the more investment, computing resources and data are put into training an AI model, the more capable it becomes.

Such resource-intensive training methods are “against the nature of intelligence”, according to Ma. Intelligence is different from knowledge, while most AI chatbots today are akin to students who memorise a lot of information but are still not very smart. Ma said his work at HKU is directed towards finding “alternative” ways for software to acquire intelligence.

The creation of the new School of Computing and Data Science, which combines two academic fields, is based on a “compelling intellectual reason” to update the education system with regard to artificial intelligence, Ma said. The merger has received the direct blessing of university president Zhang Xiang, and the unanimous support of related academic departments.

Geopolitical tensions between the US and China have started to affect the AI research community, but the HKU computing school is looking into student exchanges and other programmes to build academic relations with US universities, Ma said.

“We have universal responsibilities: We write textbooks, we share. We write papers, we share … for the greater good or benefit of the community,” Ma said. “That is why I feel that I have a little bit more value in Hong Kong than at Berkeley. Regardless of politics, the scientist community needs to talk to each other.”

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