Ren Xiaofeng, a former senior principal scientist at Amazon has joined the Alibaba Group to spearhead the group's AI development.

The move comes in the wake of the group's bid to reinforce its think tank in artificial intelligence. The Hangzhou native will lead the group's research and development team as chief scientist and deputy dean at iDST (Institute of Data Science and Technologies).

His main priority is to accelerate the pace of the group's independent research and development project dubbed "NASA". Launched in March this year, the NASA project aims to galvanize the group's technological capabilities in artificial intelligence.

Ren spent his first 16 years in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province where he attended primary school to university. His academic performances were always among the best. During his undergraduate years at Zhejiang University, Ren was awarded the first prize in an international mathematical modeling competition.

He later received his master degree from Stanford University and Ph.D. from U.C Berkeley, both majors in computer science.

He occupied the position of principal scientist at Amazon where he led a team to re-invent retail using computer vision and machine learning from 2013 to 2017.

When asked why he chose Alibaba, Ren said "Alibaba has businesses in different fields and owns a large amount of users, which means here, technologies can be commercialized quickly."

With the rapid development of technologies, computer scientists have been involved in solving many practical problems, according to Ren. "In the academic world, scientific breakthroughs are not so difficult to achieve, but it usually takes a long time to make the technologies accepted by the business world", he remarked.

"Hangzhou is my hometown and I'm very glad to have the chance to work for the city and make contribution to my country," he added.