Tang Xiao'ou (Chinese: 汤晓鸥; also spelled Xiaoou Tang; 24 January 1968 – 15 December 2023), born in Anshan, Liaoning, China, was a Chinese computer scientist and businessman working in artificial intelligence and business. He was the founder and chairman of the AI company SenseTime. Tang also served as a professor of information engineering, associate dean of engineering, and outstanding fellow of engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.^[2]

He completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Science and Technology of China, a Master of Science at the University of Rochester, and received his PhD in 1996 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of William Kenneth Stewart with a dissertation titled "Transform texture classification". Throughout his career, his affiliations included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Microsoft Research, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and SenseTime, and he supervised notable researchers including Kaiming He.

Tang's research primarily focused on areas such as computer vision, pattern recognition, and video processing.^[3] He was honored with the Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.^[4,5] He served as the programme chair in 2009 and the general chair in 2019 for the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. His editorial contributions included roles as an Associate Editor for both the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the International Journal of Computer Vision, and he was recognized as a Fellow of the IEEE.^[6]

Tang was born in Anshan, Liaoning, northeastern China in 1968.^[7] He received a Bachelor of Science with a major in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1990. He received a Master of Science from the University of Rochester in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.^[8] During his doctoral studies, he worked at MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with funders of his research including the Office of Naval Research of the United States Department of the Navy.^[10,11,12]

After graduating from MIT, Tang taught in the Department of Information Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also served as Associate Dean. In 2001, he founded the Multimedia Laboratory of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From 2005 to 2008, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia.^[13] In 2014, he spearheaded the first facial recognition to beat human accuracy and co-founded SenseTime with Xu Li.^[14] Upon SenseTime's IPO in December 2021, Tang was estimated to have a net worth of approximately $3.4 billion.

Tang died on 15 December 2023, at the age of 55. SenseTime made the announcement the next day and changed the colour scheme of its website to black-and-white in mourning, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong also changed his faculty page to a black-and-white theme.^[16]