Ant Group's 2026 InTech Award Honors 20 Young AI Researchers at Bund Conference

The award focused on four frontier areas: artificial general intelligence, embodied intelligence, digital medicine, and data processing and security privacy. The winners' research spans AI and biomedicine, 3D spatial intelligence and embodied intelligence, large-model training and inference, and cloud-native data acceleration.

The 10 InTech Technology Award recipients, listed by surname in pinyin, were: Bao Feng, for AI-biomedicine research that helped produce the first whole-body molecular spatial map of mouse organs, work Science called a milestone technology; Gu Rong, for cloud-native data elastic acceleration technologies addressing resource imbalance and low efficiency in cloud big data and AI applications; Li Hongyang, for end-to-end autonomous driving, large-scale embodied intelligence data and VLA research, and a whole-body intelligence paradigm for humanoid robots; Liu Ziwei, for human-centric multimodal visual intelligence and AI data infrastructure and open-source ecosystems; Miao Xupeng, for machine learning systems (MLSys) research and efficient computing for large-model training and inference; Qi Xiaojuan, for a 3D spatial intelligence system covering 3D perception, open-world understanding, controllable generation and embodied applications, with extensions to medicine, materials and efficient computing; Qiao Chang, for intelligent biomedical microscopy and super-resolution imaging, and intelligent optical instruments for life sciences and digital medicine; Wang Wenguan, for an agent perception-planning-interaction system inspired by spatial, causal and social cognition, applied to smart cities, smart homes and smart healthcare; Zhang Mingxing, for open-source projects Mooncake, KTransformers and AgentENV, with more than 30,000 GitHub stars, deployed on hundreds of thousands of GPUs and serving tens of millions of users; and Zhao Hang, for long-term work in embodied intelligence, building a physical intelligence system from 'cerebellum' to 'brain' and supporting industrialization of intelligent driving and general-purpose robots.

Academicians and professors presented the awards, including Chen Chun, Cai Dacheng, Michael I. Jordan, Zhang Hongjiang, Guo Minyi, Shen Chunhua and Song Zhijian. At the opening, Zhao Hang, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University and co-founder and chief scientist of Xinghaitu, asked Michael I. Jordan and Zhang Hongjiang questions on research topics, PhD training in the large-model era, academic-industry career choices, young scholar entrepreneurship and new research institutions, and what core abilities researchers still need to hone as AI becomes deeply involved in research.

Wu Minzhi, Ant Group senior vice president and chief talent officer, announced the scholarship recipients: 10 Chinese doctoral students from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and other leading universities, each receiving 50,000 yuan.

He Zhengyu, Ant Group CTO and co-initiator of the InTech Award, said, “Supporting young research talent is something worth doing for the long term.” He said the award began in 2024 for academia and added the doctoral scholarship in 2025, aiming to discover and support promising young researchers and help them stay on the research path. He said this year's award received applications from young scholars at more than 50 universities in 10 countries and regions, nearly four times the number in the first edition. He added that research development cannot rely on one company alone and that talent growth needs longer-term support.

Ant Group also announced it would invest 100 million yuan over the next three years to fund startups founded by InTech award winners, teachers and students.

Two roundtable discussions focused on choices facing young researchers in the AI era. One, titled “No Waiting for Tenure: Is Now the Best Time for Young PIs to Start Companies?”, featured Li Hongyang, Liu Ziwei and Zhang Mingxing with ZhenFund managing director Qin Tianyi, discussing entrepreneurship, collaboration between companies and labs, and extending research methods to industry. The other, “Can Best Paper Be Awarded to AI?”, brought together Jiqizhixin founder and CEO Zhao Yunfeng with Ji Jiaming, Ma Weijie and Ni Zanlin to discuss AI's scientific discovery capacity, contribution recognition, authorship and responsibility in human-machine collaboration. Ji Jiaming was first author of an ACL 2025 Best Paper, Ma Weijie was independent first author of a 2025 Nature paper, and Ni Zanlin was first author of an ICML 2026 Best Paper.

Su Tinghao, a 17-year-old high school student at German Swiss International School in Hong Kong, shared his experience conducting pretraining research independently in high school; his paper on the Attention mechanism was accepted to the ICML 2026 Main Track.

The Ant InTech Award is a nonprofit award initiated by Ant Group in 2024 to support Chinese young scholars in computer science and interdisciplinary fields. This year was the third time the ceremony was held at the Bund Conference.