Professor Hengshuang Zhao of the School of Computing and Data Science at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has been selected as one of the 2025 "35 Innovators Under 35 China" (TR35 China) by MIT Technology Review , a technology publication founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
Professor Hengshuang Zhao is a frontier pioneer in the field of Physical Intelligence. He has established a general framework for Physical Intelligence spanning two to three dimensions, perception to understanding, and virtual environments to physical reality. His work lays a scalable, deployable, and generalizable technical foundation for visual, spatial, and embodied intelligence worldwide. His early work, PSPNet, has been cited over 20,000 times as a foundational framework for semantic segmentation. He created the Point Transformer series to reshape 3D backbone networks, while his Depth Anything series has been integrated into industrial ecosystems such as Apple Core ML, bringing physical spatial perception to billions of intelligent devices. Furthermore, he developed systems like DriveGPT4 and GPT4Point, propelling artificial intelligence (AI) from "perceiving" and "understanding" the world toward "transforming" it.
Professor Zhao is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Data Science, HKU. He received his Bachelor's degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and his PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the University of Oxford's Torr Vision Group. He has also been awarded the Excellent Young Scientists Fund by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
MIT Technology Review has organised the Innovators Under 35 award to recognise the efforts of young talent pushing technological boundaries globally. The selection for the TR35 China 2025 was supported by the evaluation of over 50 experts across various fields, who provided valuable insights and recommendations across multiple dimensions, including academic research, technological innovation, and industrial practice.