Technology is the field that is introducing people to new things almost every day. Whether it is the smartphone, self-driving cars or a mission to Mars, technology is taking us to new horizons. In fact, in the past few years, it has completely transformed the way people live their lives. Great minds are coming with greater ideas, and one such great mind is the Chinese technology enthusiast and the AI expert, Kai-Fu Lee.
Kai-Fu Lee is the founder of the venture capital fund, Sinovation Ventures, and the inventor of the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, which he developed as his PhD thesis subject.
Early Life
Lee was born on 3 December 1965, in Taipei, Taiwan to a legislator and historian, Li Tianmin. In 1973, when he was thirteen, he moved to the U.S. In the U.S., he attended the Oak Ridge High School. In 1983, he completed a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University followed by obtaining a PhD degree from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.
During his PhD at the Carnegie Mellon, he got interested in machine learning and pattern recognition. He even participated in a few competitions, one of which was the US national tournament of computer players, where he represented a Bayesian learning-based system used to play the board game, Othello. He developed the system with his classmate Sanjoy Mahajan and even won the competition.
The topic of the thesis of his PhD was speech recognition, and he developed the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, speech recognition, in 1988, as a Kluwer monograph, titled Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System.
Career
After completing his PhD, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University as the member of the faculty. In 1990, after working at the university for two years, Lee left the job and started working for Apple Computer as one of the leading research scientists. At Apple, he was appointed as the head of the research and development groups that worked on the major Apple projects, including Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper, Galatea, etc. Lee stayed with Apple for six years, and in 1996, left the company to join Silicon Graphics.
At Silicon Graphics, Lee worked as the vice president of the company’s Web Products division, and then was promoted to as the president of Cosmo Software.
After two years of his job at Silicon Graphics, Lee then joined Microsoft and was sent to Beijing, to set up the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. In 2000, he shifted back to America, where he held the post of corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft.
In 2005, Lee after leaving his job at Microsoft moved to join Google. This move of Lee led Microsoft to initiate a lawsuit against Google and Lee, as Lee had joined Google within one year of leaving Microsoft, which was against the company’s non-compete agreement. Google soon resolved the lawsuits, but Lee was restricted to work on Google’s projects similar to Microsoft’s. So Google sent Lee to China to handle its Asian subsidiary, as its President. Lee held the position till 2009. He became one of the key people for the establishment of Google.cn, and the achievements that the company had during this time in China.
Founding Sinovation Ventures
Despite a great career with Google, Lee left the company in 2009, to found a venture capital to provide support for Chinese talent and technology. On 7 September 2009, Lee formed Innovation Works, later renamed as Sinovation Ventures. The company funds the five most innovative technology ideas from the Chinese entrepreneur and startups every year. Sinovation Ventures involves some big names from the tech industry as the prime investors, including YouTube, Legend Holdings, WI Harper Group, etc.
Lee collaborated with Google to bring an OS for Android specifically built for the Chinese people. The collaboration also brought a desktop phone manager for Android for China.
By 2017, the company had raised over $1 billion funds, and in 2018, it raised over $500 million from its investors. Since its inception, Sinovation Ventures has helped over 300 Chinese startups with their business establishment.
Lee is an iconic personality that has been inspiring not only Chinese people, but people from around the world. In his career, he worked with big tech companies and even chaired some big-name organisations. He held the position of the chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council. He was named under the Time 100 list in 2013 and was also featured as the Asia House Asian Business Leader in 2018.
Lee has also published a few books including Be Your Personal Best (2005), A Walk into The Future (2006), Making A World of Difference (2009), Seeing Life Through Death (2015), Artificial Intelligence (2017) and AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018).
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.