Li Deng, Ph.D., Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Global Head of Machine Learning of Vatic Investments.

Recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in AI, speech technology and machine learning, Dr. Deng was previously Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer and Head of Machine Learning at Citadel LLC. Before that, he was the Chief Scientist of AI, Founder of Deep Learning Technology Center, and Partner Research Manager at Microsoft for over 17 years. Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Deng worked for nearly a decade as a tenured professor at the University of Waterloo. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2000, Dr. Deng has also been an Affiliate Full Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering of Canada, Fellow of the Academy of Sciences (Washington State), and Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and ISCA, among other technical societies.

In recognition of his pioneering AI research on disrupting speech recognition using large-scale deep learning, Dr. Deng has been honored with many of the AI industry’s highest awards, including the IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Automatic Speech Recognition & Deep Learning” (2015) and, separately, the IEEE SPS “Industrial Leader Award” (2019). Most recently, he was presented with the AI-2000 Most Influential Scholar Award.