Courage and strength” – this is the guiding principle of Li Haixiang, known in the international business community and among database experts as Vic Lee, founder of the VI Institute.

For Vic Lee, courage and strength are the essential ingredients for success in life. These values are the foundation of his work — they shape both his business ventures and his corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Vic Lee first demonstrated this strength during his time at Tencent, China’s largest technology company and the first major milestone in his career.

Beginning in 1999 — just one year after Tencent’s founding — Vic Lee was responsible for the planning, development, and management of Tencent’s operational platforms. His areas of oversight included technical architecture, information security, payment processing, business intelligence, channel integration, core IT infrastructure, application maintenance, and customer service.

Later, Vic Lee headed Tencent’s search engine, which ranked 42nd globally among websites as of February 2022.

Among database specialists, Vic Lee is recognized not only for his hands-on expertise in query implementation but also for his lectures at professional conferences and his theoretical contributions to the field.

He has published numerous papers, including “Conceptual Modeling on Tencent’s Distributed Database Systems” (2018) and “Data Anomalies in Databases” (2021).

Vic Lee’s ability to “breathe strength” into technology is also evident in his technological research and patent portfolio. He holds several patents in data processing, covering innovations such as data storage and recovery. Particularly noteworthy is his work in Mine Vision, a field in which he developed methods that enable machines to “see” — allowing them to search for and recognize images.