Xu Li is a Chinese computer scientist, as well as the co-founder and current CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) company SenseTime. He has led SenseTime since the company's incorporation and helped it independently develop its proprietary deep learning platform. He is affiliated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His recognitions include the Best Paper Award at Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation (NPAR) 2012, as well as the Best Reviewer Award at both the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 2012 and the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2015.

Xu obtained both his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and received his doctorate in computer science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.^[1] Xu has published more than 50 papers at international conferences and in journals in the field of computer vision and won the Best Paper Award at the international conference on Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation (NPAR) 2012 and the Best Reviewer Award at the international conferences Asian Conference on Computer Vision ACCV 2012 and International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2015.^[2] He has three algorithms that have been included into the visual open-source platform OpenCV, and his "L0 Smoothing" algorithm garnered the most citations in research papers over a span of five years (2011–2015) within the ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), a scientific journal that Thomson Reuters InCites has placed first among software engineering journals.^[3,4]

Previously, Xu worked at Lenovo Corporate Research & Development. He was also a visiting researcher at Motorola China R&D Institute, Omron Research Institute, and Microsoft Research.^[5]

Selected publications include the 2017 CVPR paper "Accurate Single Stage Detector Using Recurrent Rolling Convolution" by Jimmy Ren, Xiaohao Chen, Jianbo Liu, Wenxiu Sun, Li Xu, Jiahao Pang, Qiong Yan, and Yu-wing Tai. In 2016, Jimmy SJ. Ren, Yongtao Hu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chuan Wang, Li Xu, Wenxiu Sun, and Qiong Yan published "Look, Listen and Learn – A Multimodal LSTM for Speaker Identification" at the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Publications from 2015 include "Shepard Convolutional Neural Networks" by Jimmy SJ. Ren, Li Xu, Qiong Yan, and Wenxiu Sun in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), and "On Vectorization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Vision Tasks" by Jimmy SJ. Ren and Li Xu in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). That same year, Xiaoyong Shen, Chao Zhou, Li Xu, and Jiaya Jia delivered an oral presentation titled "Mutual-Structure for Joint Filtering" at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), while Xiaoyong Shen*, Qiong Yan, Li Xu, Lizhuang Ma, and Jiaya Jia published "Multispectral Joint Image Restoration via Optimizing a Scale Map" in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). Additional 2015 works with Jiaya Jia include "Hierarchical Image Saliency Detection on Extended CSSD" by Jianping Shi, Qiong Yan, Li Xu, and Jiaya Jia in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), "Break Ames Room Illusion: Depth from General Single Images" by Jianping Shi, Xin Tao, Li Xu, and Jiaya Jia in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA2015), and "Deep Edge-Aware Filters" by Li Xu, Jimmy SJ. Ren, Qiong Yan, Renjie Liao, and Jiaya Jia in the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Further 2015 research includes two IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) papers—"Just Noticeable Defocus Blur Detection and Estimation" by Jianping Shi, Li Xu, and Jiaya Jia, and "Handling Motion Blur in Multi-Frame Super-Resolution" by Ziyang Ma, Renjie Liao, Xin Tao, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia, and Enhua Wu—as well as "Deep Multimodal Speaker Naming" by Yongtao Hu, Jimmy SJ. Ren, Jingwen Dai, Chang Yuan, Li Xu, and Wenping Wang in the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM).

Xu was ranked 7th in Fortune magazine's 2018 edition of its 40 Under 40.^[7] He was also named "China's Outstanding AI Industry Leader" by The Economic Observer, received the "Innovative Business Leader" Award under NetEase's "Future Technology Talent Awards", and was honored as Sina's "2017 Top Ten Economic Figures". In 2018, Xu was named EY's "Entrepreneur of the Year China" in the Technology category.^[8]