The inside story of Taiwan's AI whizz

When Chih-Han Yu's work on multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) was nominated as the best doctoral thesis of the year in 2010, the rising star in AI was not content with his stellar achievements, which included an early prototype self-driving car that laid the foundation for Google's self-driving car project. "People knew we were publishing high-quality research, but back in my dorm, my room-mate and I were thinking that we've worked on all this coding, but we have never seen any algorithm that has really impacted the world and transformed how people live and how business is done," said Yu, referring to his time at Harvard University. The duo decided they should do something and started a company specialising in AI-powered game engines that mimic the actions of human gamers, based on Yu's doctoral thesis. But that proved to be a mistake, said Yu, because there was no demand for the technology at the time. Two years later, they pivoted the business that would later become Appier, a supplier of AI-based marketing technology that helps businesses improve customer engagement and drive sales at a time when interest in big data was growing.