Baidu fires scientist responsible for breaching rules in high-profile supercomputer AI test

Chinese search giant Baidu has sacked the lead scientist of a research team that was disqualified for breaking the rules in an international competition testing artificial intelligence, the company said on its blog late this week. 

The team was left po-faced after the organisers of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge kicked it out of the race last month.

In its statement published on Thursday, Baidu said it had axed an unnamed member of the team as it had “zero tolerance for such behaviour”.

“We found that a team leader had directed junior engineers to submit more than two submissions per week, a breach of the current ImageNet rules,” it said.

Although the company did not reveal the person’s name, it told the South China Morning Post earlier that the leader of the five-member Heterogeneous Computing Team was Dr Ren Wu, a computer scientist based in California. 

Wu had earlier come forward to apologise for the “mistake” his group made, in what ranks as one of the world’s biggest annual AI competitions.