Two distinguished PolyU scholars were named top young Chinese researchers in the interdisciplinary areas of AI research by Baidu for their academic performance, research impact and potential in the field.

Dr Zheng Pai, Assistant Professor of Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), and Dr Sun Yuxiang, Research Assistant Professor of Department of Mechanical Engineering, are among the 50 promising researchers named in the Global Top Young Chinese Scholars in AI+X, compiled by Baidu Academic, Baidu Talent Intelligence Centers, Tianjin University and the University of Science and Technology of China.

The AI+X list includes a number of AI-driven frontier interdisciplinary areas, including autonomous driving, quantum computing, dialogue systems, urban computing and biological computing. Other young researchers named in the Baidu list include those from top universities or institutions around the world, such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, MIT, Google and Meta.

Dr Zheng is a Wong Tit Shing Endowed Young Scholar in Smart Robotics and heads the Digitalized Service Laboratory in ISE. His research interests include smart product-service systems, human-robot collaboration and smart manufacturing systems. He is the leader of the RAIDS research group that promotes futuristic industrial digital servitization in a human-cyber-physical system manner.

Dr Sun leads the Autonomous Systems Lab at PolyU that creates state-of-the-art robotic perception, planning and control systems to promote the advancement of autonomous driving and mobile robotics. His research interests also include robotics and artificial intelligence, deep learning, and autonomous systems. Dr Sun also holds editing roles for reputed international journals and conferences, including IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.