American Matt Scott (C) poses for a photo after receiving a talent award for his achievements in AI technology from the Yantian District Government on Wednesday. It is the first time for the district government to issue the award to an expat.
For the cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology he developed, Matt Scott, an American who is now based in Yantian District in eastern Shenzhen, received a talent award from the district government Wednesday.
Scott, 35, is a native of New York. He and nine others were granted this year’s Yantian Talent Award for their achievements in various fields. It is the first time for the district government to issue the award to an expat.
“It a huge honor and it [the award] means a lot to me,” Scott told Shenzhen Daily on Thursday at his office in Yantian. The young AI innovator gave a speech in Chinese at the awarding ceremony and was met with cheers and applause from the audience.
“I’ve won foreigner awards, like the top 20 foreigner entrepreneurs award, but I never was able to win a Chinese award before, because it’s like there’s a line between foreigners and Chinese, and it’s the first time that I was able to break through that line and be considered equal,” said Scott.
The main technology developed by Scott and his company, known as Malong, is customized APIs (application programming interfaces) that help clients to embed artificial intelligence in their products (such as websites, applications, back-end management systems) to help serve costumers.
“So what we do is to make computers to see products like people do,” said Scott. “But the technology is embedded in different products and platforms and individual users won’t notice the technology, it’s like a B2B2C model.”
Scott said the technology was inspired by how human sensation works with neural networks. With this advanced technology that can be applied to multiple industries, products can be tested in order to achieve efficiency, high quality and safety.
For instance, one of the company’s clients is a fabric e-commerce app named Youliaobao, which is an online platform for fashion designers and clothing makers. With the API developed by Malong for the textile industry, the app users are able to search for fabrics that match their needs by simply uploading pictures of the fabrics they are after.
Scott is the chief technology officer of the company. He was recruited to work at Microsoft at a young age before graduating from college. He has also had worked as a senior technical staff member of Microsoft Research, and has more than 15 years of R&D experience in computer vision and machine learning.
Shenzhen was not Scott’s first destination in China. He had lived in Beijing for eight years and from there he met his current partner and co-founder of the company, Huang Dinglong, a local resident of Yantian.
The two set up the company in 2014 and the startup graduated with honors from the Microsoft Ventures Startup Accelerator. They also won the first “AI Pioneer” award from Microsoft in 2016 and received other top-tier awards for the company’s AI technology from Amazon and NVIDIA.
When talking about Yantian, Scott said he fell in love with the area at first sight. “I’ve lived in many places around the world, and I think Yantian is by far the best area to work and live in,” said Scott.
The Yantian government has been more than encouraging for innovation companies, according to Scott, as evident by the jointly built AI research center developed by Tsinghua University and the Yantian District Government late last year for the R&D of AI.
