Meet 'Professor X,' the AI genius who left his lab at Princeton to beat Uber, Google, and Intel at their own game

In the spring of 2016, Dr. Jianxiong Xiao -- affectionately known among students and staff as "Professor X" -- said goodbye to his plum professorship at Princeton and his post as the founding director of the school's Computer Vision and Robotics Labs. By the fall of that same year, Xiao, known as something of a risk-taker, had moved himself and his family from New Jersey to Silicon Valley, and raised some modest seed funding for his new startup focused on self-driving cars. His startup, dubbed AutoX, has done its best to stay under the radar to date -- apart from a filing with the California DMV to test self-driving vehicles. The filing officially put the professor's mysterious startup in the company of giants, such as Tesla, Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project), Uber, and numerous other big auto companies testing self-driving cars. But Xiao isn't worried about getting run over by the giants, saying that his small team of academics possesses the kind of expertise in computer vision that big corporations just can't match.