computer science

SenseTime

SenseTime is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand SenseTime rather than just read about it. In short: SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing.

Key takeaways

SenseTime belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect SenseTime to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of SenseTime from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, medical image analysis, video analysis, autonomous driving, and remote sensing. Since 2019, SenseTime has been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government due to allegations that its facial recognition technology has been deployed in the surveillance and internment of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities. SenseTime denies the allegations. The China Internet Investment Fund, a state-owned enterprise under the Cyberspace Administration of China, holds a golden share ownership stake in SenseTime.

History

2014 SenseTime was co-founded in October 2014 by Tang Xiao'ou, a professor of the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and computer scientist Xu Li, among others.

2015 During 2015, nine of SenseTime's papers were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

2016 In 2016, 16 of SenseTime's papers were accepted in the CVPR Conference, and during the year's ImageNet competition, the company won first place in the object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis.

2017 In October 2017, Qualcomm entered into a collaboration agreement with SenseTime. The following month, the Shanghai Municipal Government signed a strategic alliance agreement with SenseTime. In December 2017, Honda and SenseTime signed a collaboration agreement. In November 2017, SenseTime set up a 'smart policing' company with Leon, a major supplier of data analysis and surveillance technology in Xinjiang.

2018 In February 2018, SenseTime and MIT announced the creation of a programme to further advance AI research. In April 2018, SenseTime, Alibaba, and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) partnered together to form a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab in Hong Kong. The following month, SenseTime signed a collaborative memorandum of understanding with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore and Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel). In August of that same summer, SenseTime launched its first North American smart health lab in New Jersey. In September 2018, SenseTime became one of the founding members of the Global Artificial Intelligence Academic Alliance (GAIAA), along with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Sydney, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, and seven other universities. On 20 September 2018, SenseTime was named as China's National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision. The Wall Street Journal reported that SenseTiime was valued at $7.7 billion at the end of 2018. As a result of its valuation, SenseTime is a unicorn. China's government designated SenseTime as one of its "AI champions" in 2018.

2019 SenseTime joined MIT's Quest for Intelligence campaign. SenseTime has a large high-performance computing network which supports its development and fielding of AI applications. According to a report by Gregory C. Allen of the Center for a New American Security, SenseTime's computing network includes "54,000,000 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) cores across 15,000 GPUs within 12 GPU clusters." In April 2019, The New York Times reported that SenseTime's software was used in the development of facial recognition systems used by the Chinese government directed largely at Uyghurs. In November 2019, SenseTime led a committee tasked with developing a standard for facial recognition in China. In October 2019, SenseTime was placed on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List for using its technology for human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Following the Entity List designation, MIT put its relationship with SenseTime under review.

2020 In August 2020, Bloomberg News reported that SenseTime was considering an IPO in Hong Kong.

2021 On 9 July, SenseTime appointed Liu Cixin as advisor to its sci-fi research project. On 19 July, SenseTime launched its international AI innovation hub in Singapore. In August, SenseTime filed for IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange and, in November, received regulatory approval to list. In September 2021, Axios reported that SenseTime uses a subsidiary, Shanghai SenseTime, to sidestep U.S. sanctions targeting subsidiary Beijing SenseTime. On 10 December 2021, on Human Rights Day, the United States Department of the Treasury placed the company on an investment blacklist on its IPO pricing day because of its alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, banning U.S. investment in the company. The company denied the allegations, said it had "been caught in the middle of geopolitical disputes," and postponed its Hong Kong IPO plan. The company hired law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which argued that the investment ban did not apply to the company's parent domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The IPO, which had already been downsized from an expected US$2 billion to $767 million due to a PRC crackdown on tech companies, was delayed further. On 13 December, SenseTime announced that it will postpone its IPO. Its $767 million Hong Kong dollars offering was relaunched in Hong Kong on 20 December. On 30 December, SenseTime completed its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

2022 On 18 February, index compiler Hang Seng Indexes Co. added SenseTime to the Hang Seng TECH Index. On 9 August, SenseTime launched its first consumer-facing product – SenseRobot – a Chinese chess-playing robot. On 19 August, Hang Seng Indexes included SenseTime in the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index and increased its weighting in Hang Seng TECH Index from 0.15 to 1.76. On 31 October, flagship Chinese publication of SPH Media Trust, Lianhe Zaobao, inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SenseTime to digitalise the newspaper's work processes for visual content.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with SenseTime

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what SenseTime claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to SenseTime before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about SenseTime ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of SenseTime

In research: SenseTime appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses SenseTime in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: SenseTime is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2014 establishments in Hong Kong, 2021 initial public offerings, Artificial intelligence industry in China, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for SenseTime outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study SenseTime in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what SenseTime means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain SenseTime out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is SenseTime in simple terms?

Why does SenseTime matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study SenseTime?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on SenseTime.