Bio

Tian Qi is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is the chief scientist for artificial intelligence at Huawei Cloud and Huawei's Consumer Business Group, the director of Guangming Laboratory in Shenzhen, and previously the chief scientist for computer vision at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab from 2018 to 2024. He is a co-author of the Pangu-Weather forecasting model recognized in Science magazine's 10 Breakthroughs of 2023.

Education

Tian completed a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic engineering at Tsinghua University in 1992, a Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University in 1996, and a Doctor of Philosophy in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002.

Career

Tian joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) as a faculty member in 2002 and remained at UTSA for seventeen years, eventually as a full professor. The UTSA period produced a substantial portion of his more than eight hundred refereed publications and eight best-paper awards in computer-vision and multimedia retrieval venues.

He joined Huawei in 2018 as chief scientist for computer vision at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, the company's central AI research division based in Hong Kong, while initially retaining the UTSA professorship. He transitioned to a full-time Huawei posture in 2019. The Noah's Ark CV chief scientist role ran through 2024, after which his current position as chief scientist for AI at Huawei Cloud and Huawei's Consumer Business Group took shape.

Notable contributions

Tian's published record covers more than eight hundred refereed papers, with citation counts in the tens of thousands across computer vision, multimedia retrieval, video indexing, and the application of deep learning to scientific computing.

• Pangu-Weather (Nature, July 2023). Co-author of the medium-range weather-forecasting model, recognized in Science magazine's 10 Breakthroughs of 2023.
• Pangu-Drug and Pangu-Wave. Subsequent applications of the Pangu architecture to drug discovery and ocean-wave modeling.
• Computer-vision and multimedia-retrieval research portfolio. Eight best-paper awards across the UTSA and Huawei periods.
• Honors. IEEE Fellow (2016); ACM Fellow (2024); AAAI Fellow; Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences. 2025 SIGMM Technical Achievement Award. 2021 Wu Wenjun AI Outstanding Contribution Award.

Affiliations

• Tsinghua University: Bachelor's student, electronic engineering, 1987 to 1992.
• Drexel University: Master's student, electrical and computer engineering, completed 1996.
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Doctoral student, electrical and computer engineering, completed 2002.
• University of Texas at San Antonio: Faculty in Computer Science, 2002 to 2019.
• Huawei Noah's Ark Lab: Chief Scientist of Computer Vision, 2018 to 2024.
• Huawei Cloud and Huawei Consumer Business Group: Chief Scientist for AI.
• Guangming Laboratory (Shenzhen): Director.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Tian is one of the most-cited Chinese-affiliated computer-vision researchers and the senior public face of Huawei's scientific-AI portfolio. The Pangu-Weather result in Nature in July 2023 was the most widely cited contribution from the Huawei AI program in Western press, predating the company's later expansion into large language models and the Ascend silicon line that has subsequently become the basis for DeepSeek-V4 and other Chinese frontier-model deployments.

The framing of "Noah's Ark Lab" in industry coverage now refers to the broader Huawei AI research organization rather than the Hong Kong unit Tian originally joined. The director of Noah's Ark Lab as of 2026 is not publicly identified in English-language sources, and Tian's current role at Huawei Cloud and CBG sits alongside rather than within the Noah's Ark organization.

Sources

• Qi Tian personal homepage. Personal academic homepage with publication list, awards, and biographical summary.
• Qi Tian Google Scholar. Google Scholar profile with citation records.
• Qi Tian Grokipedia entry. Reference biography with cross-confirmation of education and career timeline.
• Computer vision expert Qi Tian joins Huawei. Huawei Noah's Ark Lab announcement of his hire.
• Pangu-Weather. The July 2023 Nature paper introducing the Pangu-Weather forecasting model.