Mr. Yangtao Deng, a first-year PhD student working with Prof. Hong Xu, was awarded the inaugural Tencent Project Up Scholarship (腾讯青云奖学金), for his outstanding research achievements in AI systems. This is Tencent’s first-ever AI-related scholarship program to spark young scholars’ innovation, push forward cutting-edge AI research, and connect academia with industry. There will be only 15 winners from master’s/doctoral students specializing in AI and related interdisciplinary fields across China. Awardees are expected to exhibit top-tier research skills, solid academic achievements, and a forward-thinking scientific mindset. The reward includes 500,000 RMB of total support, including 200,000 RMB cash to the student and 300,000 RMB worth of cloud computing resources. The award ceremony will be held at Tencent’s headquarter in Shenzhen on Jan 29 to 30, 2026.
Yangtao’s research area is AI infrastructures and systems, particularly reliability and efficiency of large-scale pre-training. He has published first-author papers in SOSP, NSDI, and NDSS. He is a recipient of the CUHK Vice-Chancellor’s PhD Scholarship in 2025. He obtained his M.Eng. from Tsinghua University in 2024 and B.Eng. from Wuhan University.
