Wen Du Shanni Sun Tao
The 25-year-old Zhou Rui "won" again.
Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) held the first "MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition", and more than 100 participating teams competed. Xiongxing Technology, a team led by Zhou Rui, stood out and won the flagship award of the event, winning a bonus of 1$50,000.
Zhou Rui (middle) receives the MIT Ignite flagship award on behalf of the team.
Zhou Rui has a lot of "labels", MIT full award doctoral student, AI lab researcher, former Apple software engineer, in addition to these titles, Zhou Rui also has another identity - the core founder and CEO of a start-up company with a revenue of nearly 7 million yuan this year.
The company founded by Zhou Rui is Xiongxing Technology. Without any financing and third-party investment, Zhou Rui and his partners started from scratch out of their own pockets.
Zhou Rui. Start early
Zhou Rui's story has to turn to the page of his high school life.
As a freshman in high school in the United States, Zhou Rui began to teach himself programming and successfully developed three applications, involving games, time planning and greeting card making, and also won a scholarship from Apple. Subsequently, Zhou Rui began to actively participate in various algorithm competitions, and successfully advanced to the platinum group of the American Computer Olympiad (USACO).
One day, Zhou Rui saw a news report on the application of AI technology to medical imaging. This inspired him to start teaching himself AI. He began to take the initiative to contact professors from major universities and send emails to introduce his situation and ideas, and finally received a response from Song Sen, a professor at Tsinghua University School of Medicine.
In the summer of his sophomore year of high school, Zhou Rui stayed at Tsinghua University for two months and "exceptionally" entered Song Sen's research group to participate in scientific research. During this period, he was conducting AI research in medical imaging - trying to automatically analyze lung nodules in CT images.
The rich computer science Xi and competition experience obtained in high school provided Zhou Rui with very favorable help for applying for universities in the future.
In 2018, Zhou Rui received offers from three of the world's top universities, including Trinity College, Cambridge University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley. Eventually, he chose to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). This major is a special program of the university, and a total of 5 Chinese mainland students were enrolled that year.
In the end, I chose this place because it is located in Silicon Valley. I think there are more opportunities in Silicon Valley for computer science. Looking back now, it was quite the right choice. I chose the major of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science because it is a major with both software and hardware: computer science is more software-oriented, and electrical engineering is more hardware-oriented. Zhou Rui told China Science News.
While Xi at the University of California, Berkeley, Zhou Rui met Masayoshi Tomizuka, a member of the American Academy of Engineering. Following this leader in the automation and control industry, Zhou Rui was able to get involved in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. So far, Rui Zhou has published a number of articles in the field of multimodal AI research and robotics.
Zhou Rui (right) and Makoyoshi Tomizuka.
During his freshman year, Zhou Rui also went to Apple to practice Xi. Here, he saw how teams from the top companies in Silicon Valley work together, including how they work: how they create products, how they architect teams, and how they work with different people.
Zhou Rui (back row, first from left) with the Apple team.
The first impetus for entrepreneurship
In Zhou Rui's heart, he always thought about "entrepreneurship".
When I was a kid, people asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to start a business. If I start a business, I can use my thinking and technology to solve some of the core problems in the field, which I find particularly interesting. Zhou Rui said.
In 2020, during the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Zhou Rui, a sophomore, was stranded in China.
When he was worried that he had nothing to do, Zhou Rui noticed that the children of relatives and friends had been learning programming for a long time, but they couldn't learn much. Zhou Rui, who has experience in self-taught programming, found that the field of children's programming in China is very homogeneous. He came up with the idea, "If I were to do it, I would do it better than them, so why not set up a company?"”
There are many opportunities at UC Berkeley. The biggest inspiration I get is that if you want to do something, be brave enough to try. Therefore, Zhou Rui, who smelled a business opportunity, decided to start a business.
He found classmates he met in computer classes at university, they did group work together, and through collaboration, they improved their understanding, so the three of them partnered to create Ursatech (the mascot of the University of California, Berkeley is Bear, and Ursa's Chinese translation is "Ursatech").
The most important thing is that there is a clear consensus between the three of them: to apply their talents and research skills to solve existing problems in a certain industry as much as possible, rather than just making money. This is also the core motivation and vision of Zhou Rui to establish Xiongxing Technology.
After 3 and a half years of partnership, everyone said that it was more difficult to find a partner than to find a marriage partner, and I think I found it quite well. Zhou Rui told China Science News.
Today, two other partners, one is pursuing a master's degree in computer science at Stanford University and the other is pursuing a master's degree in financial engineering at Berkeley.
Zhou Rui (first from right) and the core team of Xiongxing Technology.
From a commercial point of view
Xiongxing Technology's first business is to provide programming courses for primary and secondary school students. In the process of developing their first business, they identified many problems with the existing teaching model.
The winning proposal of this MIT competition is one of the startup's core products - a smart education platform. In response to the current problems of unequal educational resources and overburdened educators in the education industry, Xiongxing Technology provides a set of AI solutions: applying multimodal AI model technology to create an intelligent platform for generative educational content.
This platform can process and utilize multiple types of information or data at the same time, including text, images, audio, etc., for ** and generation. It can assist teachers in the generation of educational content, and can also provide AI teaching assistants to interact with students in real time. For example, in the past, it may take several hours for a teacher to make a course PPT, but now it only takes ten minutes to generate a PPT using AI technology, and it can also generate lesson plans. AI teaching assistants can not only simulate the real-time interaction between real teachers and students, but also adjust teaching methods and methods according to each student's learning Xi.
"What we want to do is to hand over some of the more tedious and mechanical teaching tasks to the AI, so that teachers will have more time and energy to talk to students," Zhou said. What we are actually doing is the concept of human and AI robots cooperating to complete teaching, and the future must be that human teachers and AI will cooperate to complete teaching. ”
In February this year, after graduating from university, Zhou Rui chose to continue his doctoral studies at MIT, opening a new chapter in his academic career.
Zhou Rui chose MIT for two reasons: it has the best AI technology research and provides a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities.
In fact, all the choices Zhou Rui makes now have a commercial perspective.
In terms of the choice of mentors and laboratories, Zhou Rui said: "I have researched many of my supervisors' scientific research, and I feel that this laboratory is the most influential, interesting, and commercially valuable. ”
His Ph.D. research topic is the application of AI for multimodal industrial design to different products. At the same time, Xiongxing Technology has also opened up a new business track - intelligent manufacturing. This latest expansion of the business is also closely related to Zhou Rui's doctoral project.
Zhou Rui (first from left) and members of MIT AI Lab.
All of the interviewees in this article** are provided.