Meet some of the Chinese AI scientists dominating the field’s global top 100

Half of the leading experts are in China while another 10 are of Chinese origin and working in the US, according to report

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A joint study by a United Nations organisation and Shenzhen-based Dongbi Data has found that the majority of the world’s smartest AI scientists hail from China. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 4:00pm, 7 Jul 2025

A study of nearly 200,000 researchers and 100,000 high-impact papers has revealed that the vast majority of the world’s top 100 brains in the field of artificial intelligence are of Chinese origin.

The list was compiled by ITPO China – part of the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) – and the Shenzhen-based technology firm Dongbi Data. It was presented last week at a conference in Beijing.

Jun-Yan Zhu is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s school of computer science and one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence experts. Photo: Carnegie Mellon University

According to the report, which does not give individual rankings, 50 of the top 100 AI experts in the world work at research institutes or companies in China and are of Chinese origin.

Another 20 of the world’s AI experts work at institutes in the US. Notably, half of those are of Chinese descent, including Jun-Yan Zhu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s school of computer science – making a total of 65 out of 100.

The analysis covered more than 96,000 high-level papers from leading publications such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, as well as top conferences in the sector, from 2015 to 2024.

The research team assessed the impact of each AI scientist by counting and analysing the number of papers and citations produced over the term of the study.

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