Xuedong Huang is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Azure AI Chief Technology Officer. He is responsible for Microsoft’s Azure AI engineering and research to bring the dream of making machines see, hear and understand human beings a reality.

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Xuedong Huang joined Microsoft to found the company’s speech technology group in 1993. He helped bring speech technology to the mass market by introducing Windows SAPI in 1995, Speech Server in 2004, and Azure Speech in 2015.

 

Responsibilities include Research, Incubation, and Production to advance Microsoft’s AI stack from deep learning infrastructure to enabling new experiences. He helped Microsoft achieve multiple historical AI milestones on the open research tasks, including a human parity milestone in conversational speech recognition in 2016; a human parity milestone in machine translation in 2018; and a human parity milestone in image captioning in 2020.

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Huang has made contributions to the software and AI industry not only by his executive leadership but also through his scientific publications and inventing more than 170 US patents that impacted billions of customers globally via Azure AI. In 2016, Wired 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 research excellence medal in 1992, and IEEE Speech Processing Best Paper in 1993. He was recognized as IEEE Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2000 and named ACM Fellow by Association for Computing Machinery in 2017.

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Huang received his Ph.D. in EE from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 (sponsored by the British ORS and Edinburgh University Scholarship), his MS in CS from Tsinghua University in 1984, and his BS in CS from Hunan University in 1982.