Founded in 2014, SenseTime is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) software company, committed to its mission of "creating a better AI-empowered future through original innovation". The Company continues to lead cutting-edge AI research while accelerating the large-scale commercialisation of AI technologies.
Leveraging deep academic expertise and strong in-house innovation capabilities, SenseTime continues to enhance its industry-leading multimodal, multi-task general AI capabilities, while fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem through structured open-source initiatives.
SenseTime's business spans Generative AI, Vision AI, and emerging innovation-driven segments. Underpinned by SenseCore, its next-generation AI infrastructure, the Company integrates computing power, algorithms, and platforms to enable scalable AI deployment. Building on this foundation, SenseTime has developed the SenseNova foundation model series, delivering cost-efficient capabilities across a wide range of general AI tasks. SenseTime continues to lead the global Vision AI market, ranking No.1 worldwide by market share. Its SenseFoundry platform integrates years of accumulated computer vision expertise with advanced multimodal foundation models, providing stable and efficient Vision AI solutions to industries worldwide.
SenseTime is listed on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, with operations spanning more than a dozen countries and regions.
In the history of artificial intelligence and robotics, the year 1997 will be remembered as a turning point.
The idea of robots playing soccer was first mentioned by Professor Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Canada) in a paper entitled “On Seeing Robots” presented at VI-92, 1992. and later published in a book Computer Vision: System, Theory, and Applications, pages 1-13, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1993. A series of papers on the Dynamo robot soccer project was published by his group.
During the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95) held at Montreal, Canada, August, 1995, the announcement was made to organize the First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences in conjunction with IJCAI-97 Nagoya. At the same time, the decision was made to organize Pre-RoboCup-96, in order to identify potential problems associated with organizing RoboCup on a large scale. The decision was made to provide two years of preparation and development time, so that initial group of researchers could start robot and simulation team development, as well as giving lead time for their funding schedules.
Pre-RoboCup-96 was held during International Conference on Intelligence Robotics and Systems (IROS-96), Osaka, from November 4 – 8, 1996, with eight teams competing in a simulation league and demonstration of real robot for middle size league. While limited in scale, this competition was the first competition using soccer games for promotion of research and education.
The first official RoboCup games and conference was held in 1997 with great success. Over 40 teams participated (real and simulation combined), and over 5,000 spectators attended.