Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Chinese name
- 中国科学院自动化研究所
- Unified Social Credit Code
12100000400010945B- Websites
The Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院自动化研究所, CASIA) is a central public institution (事业单位) and one of the institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, registered at 95 Zhongguancun East Road in Beijing’s Haidian district, with Xu Bo (徐波) as its legal representative.
Its digital-human work centres on Zidong Taichu (紫东太初), the cross-modal general AI platform it first launched in 2021 and has since taken to version 4.0 (2025), developed together with the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. The platform’s virtual human Xiao Chu (小初) made its public debut at the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, demonstrating conversion and generation across images, text and speech, and the institute convened a Multimodal AI Industry Alliance in Wuhan around the model. In September 2026 the institute and Mango TV were reported to have jointly trained and created the character Sun Xiaosheng, from Mango TV’s first AIGC long-form drama The Journey After the West, who joined human singers in a Mid-Autumn Festival band.