Qi Tian
Qi Tian works on computer vision, multimedia retrieval, and AI for science. He earned his doctorate at Illinois in 2002 and worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio before moving into Huawei research. He coauthored the 2022 Pangu-Weather manuscript with Kaifeng Bi and colleagues. Their system used a three-dimensional transformer and temporal aggregation to predict global weather from reanalysis data. As of March 2026, he held roles at Huawei’s Consumer Business Group and Guangming Laboratory.
Timeline
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1992–2002
Engineering preparation
Tian earned an electronic engineering degree at Tsinghua in 1992, a master’s degree at Drexel in 1996, and an electrical and computer engineering doctorate at Illinois in 2002. His doctoral supervisor was Thomas S. Huang. This training preceded his documented work in visual information retrieval and machine learning.
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2002–2019
University research
He worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio between 2002 and 2019. His research covers finding useful images and videos in large collections, computer vision, and multimedia analysis. He also received a 2010 Google faculty research award and a 2017 UTSA research achievement award.
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2018–2024
Industry research
Tian was chief computer vision scientist at Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory from 2018 to 2024. He later held a Huawei Cloud AI role. These appointments connect his academic work to industry research on pretrained models.
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2022
Pangu-Weather
Tian coauthored Pangu-Weather with Kaifeng Bi, Lingxi Xie, Hengheng Zhang, Xin Chen, and Xiaotao Gu. The November 2022 manuscript describes training on 43 years of hourly weather data. A three-dimensional transformer represents pressure levels, while temporal aggregation reduces accumulated forecast error. The reported comparisons apply to the paper’s tested forecasting conditions.
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As of October 2026
AI for science roles
As of March 2026, he was Huawei Consumer Business Group chief AI scientist and director of Guangming Laboratory. His research interests include AI for science, vision and retrieval.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.qitian1987.com; Qi Tian profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: qitian1987.com. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.