Wu Tian

Wu Tian oversees the Chinese search giant’s artificial intelligence efforts, leading a team that has produced groundbreaking new systems in both natural language processing and computer vision. She supervised the development of PaddlePaddle, an open-source platform for deep learning—the kind of machine learning that has been responsible for most of the big breakthroughs in A.I. over the past decade—that is particularly well-suited for large-scale corporate deployments. PaddlePaddle has been used extensively by Baidu to build its A.I. applications and has attracted a dedicated following among a small community of other developers, especially in China. During COVID-19, her team has worked to apply A.I. to combating the pandemic, building software that can automatically detect whether people are wearing face masks and another that can estimate foot traffic from video footage. Her team also developed a system for pneumonia screening and prediction based on CT images as well as chatbot software that can provide people with up-to-date information about COVID-19.