Microsoft recently achieved a historical human parity milestone to recognize conversational speech on the switchboard task.  Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is the secret weapon that enabled this historical breakthrough.  This talk will explain the story behind the scenes on how Microsoft did this with CNTK.

Biography

Dr. Xuedong Huang is a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Microsoft AI and Research. He leads Microsoft’s Speech and Language Team. As Microsoft’s Chief Speech Scientist, he pioneered to lead the team achieving a historical conversational speech recognition human parity milestone in 2016.

In 1993, Huang joined Microsoft to found the company’s speech technology group. As the general manager of Microsoft’s spoken language efforts for over a decade, he helped to bring speech recognition to the mass market by introducing SAPI to Windows in 1995 and Speech Server to the enterprise call center in 2004. Prior to his current role, he spent five years in Bing as chief architect working to improve search and ads.

Before Microsoft, he was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and achieved the best performance of all categories in 1992’s DARPA speech recognition benchmarking.

He received Alan Newell research excellence leadership medal in 1992 and IEEE Best Paper Award in 1993. He is an IEEE & ACM fellow. He was named as the Asian American Engineer of the Year (2011), and one of Wired Magazine’s 25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business (2016). He holds over 100 patents and published over 100 papers & 2 books.