IDEA Lab
nonprofitThe International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA) is a research institute in Shenzhen founded in November 2020 by Harry Shum (Shen Xiangyang), former Executive Vice President of Microsoft and a founding member of Microsoft Research Asia. The academy is backed by the Shenzhen municipal government as part of the city's push to become a global AI innovation hub.
IDEA operates two major research tracks. IDEA-Research (computer vision), led by Lei Zhang, has produced world-class object detection models including Grounding DINO, DINO-DETR, Grounded SAM, and DINO-X. These models are among the most widely adopted open-source detection frameworks globally, with Grounding DINO alone accumulating tens of thousands of GitHub stars.
The second track, IDEA-CCNL (NLP/cognitive computing), produced the Fengshenbang ecosystem and the Ziya series of Chinese language models. While the CV work has garnered wider international recognition, the NLP division has contributed important Chinese-language pretraining infrastructure and fine-tuning frameworks.
People
- Harry Shum OpenReview — Founding Chairman (formerly Microsoft (Executive VP); MSRA (Founding Member))
- Lei Zhang OpenReview — Chair Scientist (Computer Vision & Robotics)
- Shilong Liu OpenReview — Former Core Researcher (Grounding DINO; now at Princeton)