This marks another international honor following the “NeurIPS 2025 Test of Time Award”.
On January 7, Beijing time, at CES 2026, Ren Shaoqing, Vice President of NIO and Chief Expert of Intelligent Driving R&D, was awarded the 2026 “SDV Software-Defined Vehicle Innovator Pioneer Award” by MotorTrend.
The SDV Software-Defined Vehicle Innovator Awards have now been successfully held for four sessions. This award aims to recognize outstanding individuals who lead change in the innovative research and development, team leadership, and professional technology of automotive software. It is also an affirmation of their role in paving new paths and leading industry development in the field of software-defined vehicles.
On the academic level, as of now, Ren Shaoqing’s academic papers have been cited over 450,000 times.
On the industrial level, Ren Shaoqing developed NIO’s high-level intelligent driving system from the ground up. He also led the initiative to propose and achieve the mass production delivery of China’s first large-scale, verifiable intelligent driving world model.
In the field of software-defined vehicles, Ren Shaoqing pioneered a long-video generation model capable of over two minutes, multi-scenario prediction methods, and an end-to-end model with future-prediction capabilities and built-in safety understanding.
It is worth mentioning that just in November 2025, Ren Shaoqing won another international award—the NeurIPS 2025 Test of Time Award—for his groundbreaking paper.
The recipients of this award over the past three years have all been Nobel Prize laureates, Turing Award winners, or co-founders of institutions like OpenAI and Google Brain. Ren Shaoqing’s win this time marks a zero breakthrough for Chinese scholars in this award.
The award-winning paper, “Faster R-CNN,” was published in 2015 with Ren Shaoqing as the first author. Currently, the paper has been cited over 98,000 times on Google Scholar.
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