Kai-Fu Lee
Founder and CEO of 01.AI; developed CMU's Sphinx speech recognizer; earlier at Apple, Microsoft and Google
- Founder and CEO, 01.AI1
Kai-Fu Lee is the founder and CEO of 01.AI, which Lee founded in May 2023, and founded Sinovation Ventures in 2009. Lee earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1988, developing the Sphinx large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system for the doctoral thesis, and later served on CMU's faculty as an assistant professor. Lee spent six years at Apple Computer heading its multimedia division and was president of Cosmo Software, SGI's multimedia software unit, before joining Microsoft Research in 1998 as director of advanced interactive systems; at Microsoft, Lee founded Microsoft Research Asia and served as a global vice president. Lee later served as a global vice president at Google, and CMU named Lee a recipient of an honorary Doctor of Business Practice degree at its 2015 commencement.1234
Work
Sphinx speech recognition system (external site: publications.ri.cmu.edu)Published research
Developed Sphinx, a large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, for a 1988 CMU doctoral thesis, and is first-listed author (as K. F. Lee, with H. W. Hon and Raj Reddy) of "An overview of the SPHINX speech recognition system" (1990), which describes the system's approach based on hidden Markov models.35
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Global Vice President, Google13
- Global Vice President; founded Microsoft Research Asia after joining Microsoft Research in 1998 as director of advanced interactive systems, Microsoft14
- Headed the multimedia division (six years), Apple Computer41
- Assistant Professor; earned a PhD there in 1988 with the Sphinx thesis, Carnegie Mellon University34
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