(Yicai Global) Sept.18 -- Li Hang, director at Chinese electronics giant Huawei Technologies Co.'s Noah's Ark Research Lab is resigning to take up a position at China's most popular free news app, Toutiao,  online tech news outlet Jiqizhixin reported.

Li, who was previously a visiting professor at the renowned Peking University, spent his last day with Huawei on Sept. 15. He was also an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow and a Distinguished Scientist with the Association for Computing Machinery, with studies focused on information retrieval, natural language processing, statistical machine learning and data mining.

He graduated from the School of Electric Engineering at Kyoto University in 1988 with a doctoral degree in computer science. He worked for NEC Corp.'s [TYO:6701] central research institute as a researcher from 1990 to 2001, and for Microsoft Research Asia as a senior and chief researcher from 2001 to 2012.

Li has been active in related academic fields and has published three academic monographs, of which the most widely known is the Statistical Learning Method published in 2012.

Toutiao is yet to make an official response to the report.

The news outlet has placed great emphasis on research in artificial intelligence, and previously brought in Ma Weiying, the former Associate Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, to lead its artificial intelligence lab.