Bio

Lin Dahua is a Chinese computer scientist. He is a lead scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory, a position he has held since November 2021, the director of the Institute of AI and Interdisciplinary Research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and an associate professor in CUHK's Department of Information Engineering. He is also a co-founder of SenseTime and director of the CUHK-SenseTime Joint Laboratory. He chairs the IEEE Large Models Standards Working Group and is the principal academic figure behind the InternLM open-source large-language-model family released through Shanghai AI Lab.

Education

Lin completed a Bachelor of Engineering in electrical engineering and information science at the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004 and a Master of Philosophy in information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012, with internships at Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley, Redmond, and Asia laboratories during the doctoral period.

Career

Lin began his independent academic career as a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago from 2012 to 2014, then moved to the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a faculty member in the Department of Information Engineering. He was promoted to associate professor and was appointed director of the CUHK-SenseTime Joint Laboratory and the Institute of AI and Interdisciplinary Research at CUHK.

He was a co-founder of SenseTime alongside Tang Xiaoou, the late computer-vision professor at CUHK, and other CUHK-based researchers. SenseTime grew out of the CUHK computer-vision lab and became one of China's largest AI companies before its Hong Kong listing.

In November 2021 Lin took on a concurrent appointment as lead scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory, where he has led the development of the InternLM open-source language-model line. The InternLM family covers the original InternLM, InternLM2, InternLM2.5, and InternLM3 base and chat models, alongside the InternLM-XComposer multimodal vision-language line. The OpenMMLab toolkit family, including MMDetection and related computer-vision libraries, is also developed under his oversight.

He took the chair of the IEEE Large Models Standards Working Group in June 2023, the IEEE working group developing technical standards for large foundation models.

Notable contributions

Lin's published record covers more than one hundred fifty papers across computer vision, generative modeling, and large language models, with two ICCV Outstanding Reviewer Awards and a NeurIPS Best Student Paper Award (NIPS 2010).

• InternLM open-source LLM family. The InternLM, InternLM2, InternLM2.5, and InternLM3 model lines.
• InternLM-XComposer multimodal models.
• OpenMMLab toolkit family, including MMDetection and related libraries.
• SenseTime co-founding. Co-founded the Hong Kong-based AI company alongside Tang Xiaoou and other CUHK researchers.
• NeurIPS Best Student Paper Award (NIPS 2010).
• IEEE Large Models Standards Working Group: Chair, since June 2023.

Affiliations

• University of Science and Technology of China: Bachelor's student, electrical engineering and information science, completed 2004.
• Chinese University of Hong Kong: Master's student, information engineering, completed 2007; subsequently Associate Professor and director of the Institute of AI and Interdisciplinary Research and the CUHK-SenseTime Joint Laboratory.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Doctoral student, EECS, completed 2012.
• Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago: Research Assistant Professor, 2012 to 2014.
• SenseTime: Co-founder.
• Shanghai AI Laboratory: Lead Scientist, November 2021 to present.
• IEEE Large Models Standards Working Group: Chair, June 2023 to present.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Lin is the principal scientific figure behind one of China's most active open-source LLM programs and one of the small group of Chinese computer-vision researchers with a documented MIT doctoral background and an industry co-founding record. The InternLM line has positioned Shanghai AI Lab as a public-research counterweight to the commercial Chinese frontier developers including DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.

The dual appointment at CUHK and Shanghai AI Lab follows a pattern at the Shanghai institute, where senior research leadership typically holds concurrent academic posts. The lab's directorship transitioned to Zhou Bowen in July 2024 following the death of co-founder Tang Xiaoou, while Lin has remained in the lead-scientist role across the leadership transition. Industry coverage has characterized Lin's research direction as anchoring the lab's public-research-first orientation, with InternLM and OpenMMLab as flagship outputs of that orientation.

Sources

• Dahua Lin CUHK faculty page. Authoritative faculty biography in the CUHK Department of Information Engineering.
• Dahua Lin Google Scholar. Google Scholar profile with publication and citation records.
• Prof. Dahua Lin CPII profile. CUHK Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence biographical profile.
• Nature: Open-source LLMs from Shanghai AI Lab. Nature coverage of the InternLM open-source LLM program.