Xuedong Huang

Dr. Xuedong Huang is General Manager of Microsoft Communications Innovation Center in Redmond, WA. Dr. Huang is currently leading a number of Microsoft’s new product initiatives such as the award-winning VOIP phone system - Response Point. He joined Microsoft Research in 1993 to found Microsoft's Speech Technology Group. From 2000 to 2004, he served as General Manager for Microsoft overall speech R&D; and business efforts. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was on faculty at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Sciences and directed the effort in developing CMU's Sphinx-II speech recognition system. Dr. Huang led the Carnegie Mellon University team achieving not only the best system in 1992's DARPA speech benchmarking, but also the most dramatic error reduction in the history of DARPA's speech evaluations. Dr. Huang received his BS in CS from Hunan University, MS in CS from Tsinghua University, and PhD in EE from the University of Edinburgh. His PhD thesis won IEEE’s prestigious Paper Award. Dr. Huang received the 1992 Alan Newell research excellence medal. He has also been recognized multiple times as one of the top 10 leaders of the speech industry. Dr. Huang serves as the Honorary Dean of College of Software Engineering at Hunan University. Dr. Huang is also an affiliate Professor at the University of Washington and serves on her industrial advisory board. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers and invented more than 30 US patents. He has co-authored two books: Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition (Edinburgh University Press 1990) and Spoken Language Processing (Prentice Hall 2001). He is a Fellow of the IEE since 2000.