According to the official website of Westlake University, award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) expert and computer scientist Qi Guojun has returned to China to join the "MAPLE Laboratory" team led by Westlake University in Hangzhou after working in the United States for more than ten years.Public information shows that Qi Guojun graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2005, majoring in automation; in 2009, he received a doctorate in automation from the University of Science and Technology of China; in 2013, he received a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Qi Guojun has two different doctorates, which he completed in only 7 and a half years. 2021,The International Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Scientists nominated 63 scholars around the world; in recognition of their outstanding educational contributions, engineering contributions, and scientific contributions to the field of computing. Among them, 19 Chinese scholars are on the list, and Qi Guojun is one of them.

From 2014 to 2024, Qi Guojun did research in the United States for ten years. He first joined the IBMT.J. Watson Research Center as a researcher, and then taught at the University of Central Florida for one year. Then he left the University of Central Florida and joined Huawei's US Research Center as Technical Vice President (TechnicalVP) and Chief AI Scientist (ChiefAIScientist).

At Huawei's US Research Center, he was mainly responsible for the Huawei Cloud EI intelligent agent project, and presided over the design of the TrafficGo smart city system, which optimized and integrated hundreds of millions of multi-modal data every day, and performed real-time control of complex road conditions at more than 200 intersections, greatly improving traffic efficiency and emergency incident handling speed. Therefore, he won the Huawei President Award.

Then, he went to OPPO and founded the OPPO Seattle Research Center. It was still based on multi-modal data processing and expanded the boundaries of research into the field of virtual reality.

Qi Guojun's main research directions include computer vision, pattern recognition, data mining and multimedia computing. He develops models to teach machines to understand information transmitted through multiple media such as text, pictures, audio, and video at the same time, making machines "smarter."

The laboratory established by Qi Guojun is called "MAPLE Laboratory" and currently has nearly 20 people. He encouraged students to focus on practical applications and look for innovations that can truly change people's lives. If the project is confirmed to be feasible, he will discuss the implementation plan with the students. Qi Guojun called this step "drawing a clear strategic map" - aligning goals, aligning execution progress, and aligning stage results.