Zhang Hongjiang (张宏江)

Founding chairman of BAAI (est. November 2018) and one of the architects of China's AI research ecosystem. Co-founded Microsoft Research Asia in 1998 and rose to Assistant Managing Director, building MSRA into the most influential industrial research lab in Asia. Left Microsoft after 12+ years to serve as CEO of Kingsoft (2011–2016), then became a venture partner at Source Code Capital before founding BAAI.

PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (1991), BS from Zhengzhou University (1982). Research in multimedia computing, video/image analysis, and content-based retrieval — ~76,700 citations, h-index 132, 62 US patents. IEEE Fellow (2004), ACM Fellow (2007), elected to the US National Academy of Engineering as International Member (2022). Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2004–2007).