Background
Liu Changping was born in 1965, China.
昌平 刘
Liu Changping was born in 1965, China.
Liu was obtained his PhD from the Institute of Computing Technology.
In 1989, Liu started to study OCR as a staff member of CAS. Compared with the traditional manual approach, OCR is capable of recognizing text in images, thus achieving fast, accurate, and low-cost text input and enhancing the operational efficiency of companies. Between 1990 and 1997, Liu piloted several national-level, fundamental research projects including OCR on handwritten numbers, printed Chinese characters, mixed English and Chinese texts, and multi-font Chinese characters. In August 1996, he began to develop OCR software, which was then bundled with Microtek scanners. This software significantly contributed to the prevalence of scanners. At the same time, Liu led the ‘multi- language printed texts OCR’ project. Through collaboration with the China National Software & Service Co., Ltd (Chinasoft), his team successfully launched the Japanese version of OCR software in Japan.
In 1998, Hanwang Technology Co. Ltd acquired the OCR R&D division of Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd an affiliate of CAS. This acquisition shifted the career track of Liu, and translated his technical expertise into commercial value. At the time, China’s OCR market was dominated by three oligopolists, namely Hanwang, Dawning, and Wintone Information Technology Ltd, the affiliate of Tsinghua University. In 1998 Hanwang’s revenue increased by 600 percent and exceeded RMB 100 million. With such rapid growth, Hanwang invested both in hardware manufacturing bases and newly applied technologies such as OCR. The acquisition of Liu and his research team ensured Hanwang’s leading position. Liu Changping has commercialized his technical know-how, and four out of the five leading scanner brands have bundled Hanwang’s OCR software. The majority of domestic banks are using Hanwang’s OCR systems for banknote recognition. The company’s hardware and software have been widely applied to banks, security firms, insurance companies, tax authorities, public security, customs, airports, commercial administration, dossier management, mobile phone-based recognition of business cards, and other domains.
Since the arrival of Liu, Hanwang’s success ratio in R&D has increased from 5 percent to 50 percent, substantially higher than the industry level of 5–15 percent. This is mainly attributable to the fact that Hanwang’s innovation system was properly aligned to its development system. Liu’s research team had fixed two principles: the first was to improve the research activities on a long-term and sustainable basis; and the second was to build R&D excellence as the company’s core competence, leaving the hardware in a supporting role. Facing the need of massive digitalization, Liu commented on the prospects for the OCR industry: ‘We probably can’t give an exhaustive list of OCR’s applications today, but in the future, text recognition technology will be increasingly used to the place where there is text, its utility will be further increased in our daily life. We simply can’t imagine how big this market is going to be’ (China Youth Daily, 2007). Therefore, he is determined to devote himself to this domain, as a herald of theory, technology and business operation.