Tiancheng Lou

Tiancheng Lou (; born 1986) is a Chinese businessman who is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Pony.ai, an autonomous vehicle technology company. He is also a competitive programmer whose achievements include winning the Google Code Jam twice in 2008 and 2009, winning the TopCoder Open Marathon in 2015 and being a gold medalist at the 2004 International Olympiad in Informatics, coming third overall. In terms of prize money won in major competitions, Lou is currently the most successful competitive programmer from China. In 2017, Lou was included in the Innovators Under 35 list by MIT Technology Review magazine. In 2022, Business Insider named him as one of the 35 under 35 rising stars of the autonomous-vehicle industry. Early life and education Lou was born in 1986 in Jinan, Shandong province. When he was in sixth grade of primary school, he moved to Hangzhou, Zhejiang province due to his parents' work. Both of his parents worked at Zhejiang University where his father was in the School of Public Affairs while his mother was in the Department of Chemistry. Lou attended Hangzhou No. 14 High School where he graduated in 2004. In 2004, Lou came third place overall in the 2004 International Olympiad in Informatics where he won a gold medal. Due to his performance, he received a recommendation to attend Tsinghua University at the department of Computer Science and Technology.