Xiaodi Hou

As a researcher, my interest is to analyze the internal representation of the mind. As the CTO of TuSimple LLC, my job is to streamline the process from academic research to real-world product.

An emphasis of my research rests on the behavioral similarity between computational models and the neural systems. Behaviors in humans, ranging from single cell recordings, to psychophysical experiments, are priceless reference for an artificial system. As long as the behavior data shows significant similarity, there must be a reason. And it is our goal to understand how and why such similarity occurs.

In TuSimple, our research is less constrained from short-term financial obligations than most of the research labs in universities, and completely free from publishing pressures of beating all other unrealistically complex algorithms on absurdily biased datasets, irrespective of implementation cost, maintenance cost, and runtime cost. I believe that this new venture will help us reach further than what is currently achievable for the academia.

Who am I

I was born in Shijiazhuang, China. Since the age of 2, I moved to Beijing, and spent most of my first 20 years in this lovely capital city of China.

After 6 years of abandoning myself in computer network security in High School affiliated to Renmin University, I came to Shanghai Jiao Tong University for undergraduate study. my major is Computer Science and Engineering.

In November 2004, I met Professor Liqing Zhang. He introduced me to the fantastic world of cognitive science and computer vision. In Lab of Brain-like Computation and Machine Intelligence, I started my investigation from EEG-EOG signal analysis. Shortly after, my interests had been diverted to the computational nature of vision.

In 2008, I joined the Ph.D. program at the Department of Computation and Neural System of California Institute of Technology. As the last generation of the KLab, I worked under the supervision of professor Christof Koch. After the closure of the lab in 2012, I collaborated with professor Alan Yuille from UCLA and finished my thesis while commuting between Pasadena and Santa Monica in early 2014.

After graduating, I moved to San Diego, and co-founded TuSimple, a research oriented AI company. Since then I work closely with my partners Mo Chen, Jianan Hao, Zehua Huang, Naiyan Wang and other colleagues to solve the real world problems, such as autonomous driving.

Education

  • Ph.D. 2014

    Doctor of Philosophy, Computation and Neural Systems

    California Institute of Technology

  • B.Eng.2008

    Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University