Yao Qi, former Microsoft vice president, returns to XiaoIce as chief technology officer

Jin Lei from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit Report | Public Account QbitAI

Just now, XiaoIce announced a major personnel change:

Steven Yao, former Microsoft vice president and Microsoft global distinguished engineer , has officially assumed the position of chief technology officer of XiaoIce .

After joining Xiaobing, what will Yao Qi do?

It is understood that Yao Qi will join Xiaoice this time and lead the technical team to promote the development of a complete and iterative artificial intelligence Xiaoice framework based on natural language processing (NLP) .

Specifically, under his leadership, XiaoIce's leading advantages in open domain conversational AI, multimodal interaction, super natural voice, AI content generation, and AI beings diversity will be expanded.

The reason for this move is that Yao Qi believes that if Xiaoice is to become the best AI in the world, in addition to being the best in the field of virtual human and human interaction, it is also necessary to make sufficient technical reserves in other technical directions within the Xiaoice framework.

He will work with the team to enhance the leading edge of XiaoIce's technology system.

Just recently, XiaoIce Company launched the world's first social networking platform app where humans and AI coexist.

Each of these AI individuals is unique and works together to provide users with a complete social and content experience.

In this regard, Yao Qi believes:

For technology research and development, this is a large-scale social experiment that is rare in decades. All real interactions between virtual humans and humans can be tried on this island.

Therefore, the current XiaoIce product system requires the best technical support, while also needing to make technical reserves to support the explosive growth of AI Beings and further enhance the user experience in key scenarios such as human-to-human interaction, artificial intelligence music, and short video content generation.

About Yao Qi

Yao Qi is a world-leading technical expert in natural language processing, machine learning, deep conversations, user behavior prediction and other fields, and has trained many talents in the industry.

Yao Qi studied computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, received a master's degree in computer science from the University of Arizona, and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Washington.

Yao Qi joined Microsoft headquarters in 1997 and was responsible for the research and development and team management of MSN Search, Bing Core Search, content recommendation algorithms, deep learning platforms, event prediction algorithms and systems.

In 2006, he returned to Beijing and became one of the founders of Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Academy (STCA) .

He and Xiaobing have a deep connection.

From 2015 to 2016, Yao Qi led the R&D team at STCA to develop the fourth and fifth generations of XiaoIce.

In 2018, Yao Qi was awarded the honor of Microsoft Global Outstanding Engineer.

Microsoft Global Distinguished Engineers is a long-term program launched by Microsoft since 2000 to motivate top technical contributors (Individual Contributors) .

Previous recipients of this honor include technical experts such as Mark Lucovksy, a core member of Windows NT/Windows 2000, and Peter Spiro, who was responsible for the core development of SQL Server.

In the past 21 years, only a few Chinese engineers, including Yao Qi, have received this honor.

As for his return to Xiaobing, Yao Qi expressed his anticipation.

Recruiting strong players worldwide

In fact, before Yao Qi, Xiaobing had already recruited powerful players from all over the world.

For example, in July this year, Hiroki Nakamura, who was the head of Yahoo Japan's intelligent voice assistant and the head of artificial intelligence at Japan's LINE Group , joined the XiaoIce team.

As for the reason, Hiroki Nakamura said:

Hope to realize self-worth and create the first virtual employee.

When I was working at LINE, I found that communication was often the obstacle to business progress.

As technology continues to advance, virtual humans will be able to express themselves without restriction. I believe virtual humans have great potential.

It can solve a lot of social problems, so I am very much looking forward to joining XiaoIce and hope to explore the future with such a team.

Earlier, the producer of "Crayon Shin-chan", Hidetaka Ikuta, officially joined XiaoIce Japan Company on July 15 this year and became a member of the product team.

Prior to this, he had been "interning" in the team for four months, working with young colleagues to shape the characters of AI Beings.

About XiaoIce

XiaoIce Company was formerly known as the Microsoft XiaoIce Team.

On July 13, 2020, Microsoft announced that it would spin off XiaoIce into an independent entity and continue to maintain its investment interests. After the spin-off, the team accelerated the integration of global cutting-edge technologies and localized products, expanding its leading edge in basic research in artificial intelligence.

At present, the XiaoIce framework is one of the world's most complete artificial intelligence frameworks with the largest interaction volume, and its technologies cover natural language processing, computer speech, computer vision and artificial intelligence content generation.

Among them, it is a global leader in open domain dialogue, multimodal interaction, super natural voice and content generation.

Currently, there are more than 1 billion smart devices with XiaoIce deeply embedded in them, and XiaoIce has become the world's largest third-party cross-device artificial intelligence system.