Innovators Under 35
INNOVATIVE Entrepreneurs
E5. Jianxiong Xiao, 33
AutoX
His company AutoX aims to make
self-driving cars more accessible.
Jianxiong Xiao aims to make self-driving cars as widely
accessible as computers are today. He’s the founder and CEO of AutoX, which
recently demonstrated an autonomous car built not with expensive laser sensors
but with ordinary webcams and some sophisticated computer-vision algorithms.
Remarkably, the vehicle can navigate even at night and in bad weather.
AutoX hasn’t revealed details of its software, but Xiao is an
expert at using deep learning, an AI technique that lets machines teach
themselves to perform difficult tasks such as recognizing pedestrians from
different angles and in different lighting.
Growing up without much money in Chaozhou, a city in eastern
China, Xiao became mesmerized by books about computers—fantastic-sounding
machines that could encode knowledge, logic, and reason. Without access to the
real thing, he taught himself to touch-type on a keyboard drawn on paper.
The
soft-spoken entrepreneur asks people to call him “Professor X” rather than
struggle to pronounce his name. He’s published dozens of papers demonstrating
clever ways of teaching machines to understand and interact with the world.
Last year, Xiao showed how an autonomous car could learn about salient visual
features of the real world by contrasting features shown in Google Maps with images
from Google Street View.
—Will
Knight
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
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