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Tencent appoints global AI expert to head new Seattle lab

Yu Dong is former principal researcher of speech and dialog at Microsoft, and the holder of 60 patents

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Yu Dong, deputy director of Tencent AI Lab. Photo: Handout

Tencent Holdings, which operates China’s largest social networking empire, is opening a new artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Seattle, in its latest effort to jockey for position in what’s expected to become the next fronter in internet technology.

The facility is Tencent’s first AI research site outside of China after the launch of its core AI Lab at its headquarterers in Shenzhen in April last year.

The Seattle lab will be run by global speech recognition expert Yu Dong, who is expected to “drive research on speech recognition and natural language processing”, at the site, the company said.

Yu was previously principal researcher of speech and dialog at Microsoft, an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University, the holder of 60 patents, and one of the founders and leading authors of CNTK, an open source deep learning toolkit.

His appointment is Tencent’s second high-profile AI hiring in two months after employing Zhang Tong, an expert in big data and the former head of Baidu Inc’s big data lab, to be the executive director of its main AI Lab in Shenzhen.

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