📍🏆 CES 2025 Innovation Award (Only Award from Mainland China)

Oct 8, 2025 3 min read
CES Official HKUST(GZ) Official News
CES 2025 Innovation Award

Won the Innovation Award in the AI Category at CES 2025 - the only award-winning project from Mainland China!

My startup, Yuanhuo Technology, which I founded, was honored for developing a personalized AI companionship platform. The project is built on the principle of creating AI with a “human touch” to make technology more accessible and address educational inequities.

We are incredibly grateful to be named a CES Innovation Awards 2025 Honoree (Artificial Intelligence). It is a funny story: I actually found the award notification email in my spam folder—so a friendly tip for anyone applying next year: be sure to check your spam.

There is a classic line: “A teacher’s purpose is to pass on the Dao, impart knowledge, and resolve doubts.” This idea is at the heart of why we founded Yuanhuo Technology (元惑科技). Pure technology—like education—should have no boundaries. We regret that, due to visa issues, we were unable to travel to the U.S. to be there in person. We are deeply grateful to the Entrepreneurship Center for their unwavering support, and especially to Vice President Prof. Hui Xiong and his team for flying to the U.S. to accept the award on our behalf. We were all online at 3 a.m. to witness that moment together.

My heartfelt thanks go to Prof. Lei Chen and Prof. Jing Tang for their guidance since I enrolled. From our academic research and practical projects to the early days of Yuanhuo, their mentorship has focused on integrating large language models (LLMs) with multi-agent systems for domain applications.

Thank you to President Lionel Ni and PAD for their tremendous support. We are happy to share both this joy and the story behind it. My time in the Red Bird M.Phil. program over the past year has been both joyful and painful—like developing calluses from practicing on a high bar: it hurts as they form, but you are proud to have them. My teammates Dawei Xiong, Cekai Weng, Wenqi Zheng, and I came from the same Red Bird project group. Each of us brought different skills, complementing one another well. I remember Prof. Jenny Zhou joking that our group’s interdisciplinary collaboration stood out.

The university provides strong support for entrepreneurship. Beyond the Entrepreneurship Center’s help with CES and knowledge transfer, the “Entrepreneurship Bridge” (创业桥) program—initiated by Vice President Prof. Jingshen Wu and operated by the Future Technology Lab—has also been a great help, along with the support of our Entrepreneurship Association. During a trip to Beijing, Prof. Dong Lv shared high expectations for the second cohort in the Entrepreneurship Bridge program. I highly recommend that all Red Bird students join it.

As Prof. Lei Chen wrote, AI needs not only technical precision but also a human touch. Whether we talk about LLMs, earlier digital humans, or today’s agents, the technology is still progressing—and so are we. Yuanhuo has a long road ahead. Thank you for the congratulations; we will stay grounded and keep moving forward, step by step. We warmly welcome partners and friends who would like to connect and collaborate.

Project: LLM-driven digital friends and communities for you.

Team: Yuanhuo Technology Co., Ltd.

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Junwei Li
Junwei Li
Research Fellow

My research interests include Multi-Agent LLM Systems, RAG/Graph-RAG, Educational Technology and compliance-aware AI companions for cloud–edge education and assistive use.