Professor Yao is a world-renowned computer scientist and pioneer in cryptography and quantum computing. He was recipient of the Turing Award in 2000 and to date the only Chinese scientist receiving this highest honor in computer science. Professor Yao served on the faculty of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Princeton University before leaving Princeton in 2004 to join Tsinghua University. At Tsinghua, Professor Yao founded an elite undergraduate CS programme (the “Yao Class”) in 2005, and another elite AI programme (the “Zhi Class”) in 2019. He founded IIIS (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences) in 2011 and built it into a world-renowned interdisciplinary research centre, including a cutting-edge quantum computing laboratory. In 2018, Professor Yao established the Turing AI Institute (Nanjing) and the Core Technology Institute (Xian) to enable close innovation partnerships with municipalities. In 2020, he established the Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute to undertake AI-inspired fundamental research across disciplines. Professor Yao is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and foreign member of the US Academy of Sciences.