Xuedong Huang

Xuedong David Huang (also known as XD, Simplified Chinese: 黄学东, b. October 20, 1962) is the key person behind Microsoft's speech recognition technologies as well as its VOIP Response Point product line. He is currently the divisional architect in Microsoft's online services including Bing, MSN and adCenter.

Background
Huang grew up in Hunan, China and became a US citizen in 1995. He is the son of Heqing Huang and Jiansong Ling. He has an older sister named Qingshou Huang. He is married to Ginger Huang and has 3 children: Derek, Christina, and Angela. He currently resides in Bellevue, Washington'.

Education
In 1978, Huang entered Hunan University without finishing his high school. He graduated with a B.S. degree in computer science from Hunan University in 1982, and went on to earn a MS in computer science from Tsinghua University. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Edinburgh.

Academic research
He joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty in 1989 and worked with Raj Reddy and Kai-Fu Lee on speech recognition. At CMU, Huang directed Sphinx-II speech system research that had the best overall performance in every category of DARPA's 1992 benchmarking. He received the 1992 Alan Newell research excellence medal for his leadership in speech recognition.

Huang has co-authored two books: Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition, (1987) and Spoken Language Processing, Prentic Hall(2000). He became an IEEE Fellow in 2000. Huang received the National Education Commission of China's 1987 Science and Technology Progress Award, IEEE 1993 Speech Processing Best Paper Award. SpeechTek has named him a top 10 leader of the speech industry.

Microsoft
Huang is known as Mr Speech at Microsoft for founding its speech recognition initiatives. Huang is currently the divisional architect driving Bing's next generation services.

Before his current role Huang was general manager of Microsoft's Communications Innovation Center. He helped to create Microsoft Response Point that received 2009's Technology of the Year Awards for the best VOIP phone system from the InfoWorld Magazine.

Huang has spent his career helping to advance speech recognition technologies in a variety of capacities. He was the key leader who brought Microsoft's Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) and speech recognition/TTS technologies to the public. From 2000 to 2004, Huang served as general manager of Microsoft's Speech Platforms Group, where he led both the business and engineering teams that shipped Microsoft Speech Server and other voice technologies used in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Windows Mobile and Microsoft Exchange Server.

Hunan University and University of Washington
In addition to his responsibilities at Microsoft, Huang is currently the Honorary Dean of School of Software Engineering at Hunan University helping to modernize China's software engineering education. He also serves as an affiliate Professor and is a member of the Industrial Advisory Board of EE at University of Washington.

TV and books

 * Robert MacNeil, William Cran, Robert McCrum (2005). Do You Speak American? page 191-197, Harcourt Trade
 * PBS TV: Do You Speak American? 2005
 * Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon (2001). Spoken Language Processing: a guide to theory, algorithm, and system development, page 1-980. Prentice Hall
 * Xuedong D Huang, Yasuo Ariki, Mervyn A Jack (1990). Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition, Edinburgh University Press