Zhang Lei's MSRA Rise: A Face Detection Contest and Chinese AI's Rise

Zhang Lei, then a recent PhD graduate working mainly on image retrieval, beat a team led by face recognition expert Li Ziqing in a 2002 Microsoft Research Asia contest to build a face detection system. He cut the false-positive rate from roughly 50% to 1%, and the algorithm was integrated into Windows. Several members of his team later became prominent figures in China's technology industry.