SHANGHAI - It has been a long and winding road to success for Hong Kong-based SenseTime Group. The Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) giant finally went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last month, despite the initial date being postponed after it was added to a United States government blacklist that prevented US investors from buying into it. The stock has surged 86 percent since then.

The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ that was first coined in 1956 has now become a universally applied technology and a basic infrastructure of this era, said co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Xu Li at the listing ceremony. AI is expanding mankind’s perception of the world though AI-driven computing devices and breakthroughs in Big Data technology, he added.

Although ‘AI’ is not a new phrase, the sector is. SenseTime is a pioneer in the field and has taken the road less traveled to get to where it is today. It is the first of China’s four ‘AI tigers,’ comprising SenseTime, Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology, Yitu Technology in Shanghai, and Beijing-based Megvii Technology, to go public.

Record-Breaking Accuracy 
SenseTime is more ‘pedantic’ than other AI firms, with a strong focus on research. Employees all do laboratory work, churn out papers and take part in competitions.

Between 2011 and 2013, SenseTime was behind half the articles published worldwide on deep learning (DL), at 14 papers. Founder Tang Xiao’ou’s DeepID facial recognition algorithm was released in 2014, with an accuracy rate of 98.52 percent. The following year the firm broke US tech giant Google’s record for accuracy at the ImageNet large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge.

The company has the largest AI research and development team in Asia, made of 250 staff with doctoral degrees, 40 professo