Xuedong D. Huang (born October 20, 1962) is a Chinese American computer scientist and technology executive who has made contributions to spoken language processing and AI Cognitive Services. He is Microsoft's Technical Fellow and Chief Technology Officer of Azure AI. Huang is a strong advocate of AI for Good, AI for Accessibility, and AI for Cultural Heritage.

Education

Huang received his PhD in EE from

the University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 1582 ...

in 1989 (sponsored by the British

ORS Ors () is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. It is located on the Sambre–Oise Canal, in a small wood called Bois l'Évêque. History The commune was an area of intense fighting in November 1918 for control of the canal. Sec ...

and Edinburgh University Scholarship), his MS in CS from

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (; abbreviation, abbr. THU) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Minis ...

in 1984, and BS in CS from

Hunan University Hunan University (HNU; ; pinyin: Húnán Dàxué''),'' colloquially abbreviated as HúDà (湖大), is a national key public research university located in Changsha, Hunan, and a Double First Class University as well as a member of Project 211 ...

in 1982.

Career

After receiving his PhD in 1989, Huang joined

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

and worked with

Raj Reddy Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mello ...

and

Kai-Fu Lee Kai-Fu Lee (; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, businessman, and writer. He is currently based in Beijing, China. Lee developed a speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie ...

on speech recognition. At CMU, he directed the Sphinx-II speech system research which achieved the best performance in every category of

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

's 1992 benchmarking.

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

recruited him to found and lead Microsoft's spoken language initiatives in 1993. His co-authored book ''Spoken Language Processing'' and his ''Historical speech recognition review'' succinctly summarize several generations of spoken language research. As Microsoft's ''Mr. Speech'' for nearly three decades, Huang has been instrumental in creating Microsoft's

Speech Application Programming Interface The Speech Application Programming Interface or SAPI is an API developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech recognition and speech synthesis within Windows applications. To date, a number of versions of the API have been released, which ha ...

(SAPI), shipping

Microsoft Speech Server The Microsoft Speech Server is a product from Microsoft designed to allow the authoring and deployment of IVR applications incorporating Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis and DTMF. The first version of the server was released in 2004 as Micro ...

, and modernizing spoken language and integrative AI services via Azure AI Cognitive Services, which not only enables access to millions of 3rd party customers but also powers Microsoft's own AI scenarios from

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Office An office is a space where an Organization, organization's employees perform Business administration, administrative Work (human activity), work in order to support and realize objects and Goals, plans, action theory, goals of the organizati ...

, to Teams. Huang helped Microsoft and Azure AI achieve multiple industry's first human parity milestones on the following open research tasks: transcribing conversational speech, machine translation, conversational QnA, and computer vision image captioning. Huang has made significant contributions to the software and AI industry through his executive leadership and his scientific publications, owning more than 170 US patents and impacting billions through Azure AI enabled products and services. In 2016,

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...

magazine named him one of ''25 Geniuses''. In 2021, Azure AI was named the winner of InfoWorld's ''Technology of the Year Award''. Huang was awarded the

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department ...

research excellence medal in 1992, and IEEE Speech Processing Best Paper in 1993. He was recognized as an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

in 2000, and named

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

in 2017. Huang received 2022 Asian American Corporate Leadership Award, and IEEE Amar Bose Industrial Leader Award for “contributions in speech recognition and industrial leadership in artificial intelligence.”

Customer story of Azure AI

* ''Aberdeen City Council'' in Scotland answers calls for customer service * ''Airbus'' accelerated innovation * Automation Anywhere uses Azure AI to support UK healthcare provider’s COVID-19 response * ''BBC'' reads its articles and enables "Beeb" assistant * CDC launches coronavirus bot to help take strain off healthcare system * Dentsu Aegis Network uses Azure AI to support global clients like General Motors, P&G and Kraft Heinz * EU brings the parliament closer to citizens with Azure live speech translation * GE rapidly converts customers’ paper-based records into digital formats * KPMG helps financial institutions save millions in compliance costs * Looney Tunes and BBC all speak with Azure voice * Motorola Solutions helps first responders using just their voice * NHS leads innovation with Azure AI * NYC is fulfilling consistent societal needs * Progressive insurance shoppers gain new service channel * RXR Realty reopens for business to fight Covid-19 * Swisscom uses Azure to drive innovation, market leadership with multilingual voice assistant * TIBCO takes anomaly detection to the edge * Uber boosts platform security with facial recognition * University of Nottingham empowers remote research and learning * Vodafone transformed its customer care strategy * Volkswagen engages global customers with real-time translation * Walgreens customer service now on Microsoft Azure AI

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Huang, Xuedong 1962 births Living people Chinese emigrants to the United States Fellow Members of the IEEE Tsinghua University alumni Carnegie Mellon University faculty Scientists from Hunan Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Microsoft employees Chinese computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Speech processing researchers Hunan University alumni American computer scientists Natural language processing researchers Computer scientists