Alibaba has parted ways with Wang Gang, a renowned computer scientist who has served as head of the tech giant’s autonomous driving lab under its Damo Academy research division for three years, Chinese media reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Wang, a former tenured professor at Nanyang Technological University, joined Alibaba in early 2017 as the chief scientist for the company’s artificial intelligence lab and was tasked with improving speech recognition capabilities and launching the company’s first smart speaker device, the AliGenie X1, later that year. Wang plans to found a startup developing robot vacuum cleaners, the sources said. [TechPlanet, in Chinese]