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Google DeepMind director Cao Liangliang makes a boomerang return to Hong Kong

In a homecoming for Hong Kong’s artificial intelligence community, Cao Liangliang – former principal engineer and director at Google DeepMind, IEEE Fellow and architect of foundational AI systems at Google, Apple and IBM – has returned to the city after a two-decade absence. His appointment as Chair

South China Morning Post

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8 يوليو 2026

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In a homecoming for Hong Kong’s artificial intelligence community, Cao Liangliang – former principal engineer and director at Google DeepMind, IEEE Fellow and architect of foundational AI systems at Google, Apple and IBM – has returned to the city after a two-decade absence.

His appointment as Chair Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) last week completes an intellectual boomerang trajectory that began under renowned mentor Tang Xiao’ou at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003.

From Cao’s early work at Tang’s pioneering Multimedia Laboratory, from which the AI company SenseTime emerged, to leading roles shaping Silicon Valley’s most advanced AI – including Gemini, Apple Intelligence and Vision Pro – he has built global influence in machine learning that could energise Hong Kong’s academic ecosystem.

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“Returning to Hong Kong is a full-circle moment for me,” Cao announced on his personal website.

Born in Donggang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, Cao was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), a leading Chinese science and technology institution, in 1998. When he graduated in 2003, he met Tang Xiao’ou, who had come to USTC to recruit students.

Tang, a PhD graduate of MIT, returned to Hong Kong to teach in the Department of Information Engineering at CUHK in 1998. Before his death in 2023, Tang recruited outstanding USTC graduates to join MMLab, many of whom have since become prominent figures in China’s AI industry.

Cao received his master’s degree from MMLab in 2005 and worked there as a research assistant until 2006, when he moved to the United States to pursue his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Thomas S. Huang. Huang, who died in 2020, was known as the “father of Chinese computer vision”.

Cao received top-tier training in AI and computer vision at UIUC. In 2010, he placed first in the ImageNet competition organised by Li Fei-Fei, who is now a tenured professor at Stanford.