Tencent poaches leading AI scientist Yu Dong from Microsoft
Tencent Holdings has hired Microsoft Research’s speech and dialogue principal scientist, Yu Dong, as vice general manager of its newly opened artificial intelligence lab in Seattle. A speech-recognition expert, Dong will oversee the lab’s operation and carry out speech and natural language processing research for Tencent. Yu is also a professor at Zhejiang University.





Tencent Holdings Ltd. has hired Yu Dong (pictured), a speech recognition expert and former principal scientist at Microsoft Research, as its vice general manager of Tencent AI Lab in Seattle.

Tencent just established an AI lab in Seattle, and the recruitment of Yu Dong is viewed by industry watchers as an audacious move for the Chinese company to poach talent from Microsoft in the home town of the U.S. tech giant.

Yu will be responsible for the new lab’s operations and management, as well as carrying out research in artificial intelligence including speech recognition and natural language processing, according to an article published by Tencent’s technology news portal.

Yu was previously the principal scientist at Microsoft Research’s Speech and Dialog Group, as well as a professor at Zhejiang University, a visiting professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, and a visiting researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

In 2012, he led efforts to develop the CD-DNN-HMM model, a novel context-dependent model for large vocabulary speech recognition that leverages advances in using deep belief networks for phone recognition. The model was titled the best paper award by IEEE Signal Processing Society, and has contributed greatly to the development in speech recognition technology, according to the article.

Tencent has pushed into artificial intelligence aggressively. It established Tencent AI Lab in its headquarters in Shenzhen last April to focus on combining basic AI research with application, and providing AI technology support for the company’s products.

Headed by Zhang Tong, former vice president at Baidu Research, Tencent AI Lab currently has over 50 artificial intelligence scientists and more than 200 application engineers.