Yu Kai

Kai Yu got his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University in 1999, 2002 and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2006. He is a senior member of IEEE, a Technical Committee Member of the Speech, Language, Music and Auditory Perception Branch of the Acoustic Society of China, and a Technical Committee Member of the Human Machine Interaction Branch of China Computer Federation. He is also the associate director of the technical committee of the Alliance of Intelligent Speech Technology Industry of China. He was selected into the “1000 Overseas Talent Plan (Young Talent)” by Chinese central government, the “Excellent Young Scientists Project” by NSFC China and the Programme for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning. 

His research interests include dialogue systems, speech recognition, synthesis, speaker verification, natural language processing and machine learning. The goal of his research is to build speech-based cognitive user interface which can operate in complex environment, deal with uncertainty, deliver  information in a humanized way and evolve via interacting with human. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and won several best paper awards of international conferences (InterSpeech and IEEE SLT) and the ISCA Computer Speech and Language Best Paper Award (2008-2012). He has served as the area chairs for speech processing and dialogue systems for EUSIPCO and INTERSPEECH. 

He has participated in the DARPA funded large vocabulary continuous speech recognition project, EARS and GALE. The systems he built have defined the state-of-the-art during NIST organised evaluation and DARPA organised internal evaluation. He has also designed and managed the implementation of the Cambridge statistical spoken dialogue system, which achieved the best task completion performance in controlled test during the first spoken dialogue challenge. He has been active in knowledge transfer to industry. He was awarded WuWenJun Science and Technology Progress Award by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence for his contribution in commercialising speech technology for language learning. He was also awarded the “IT Pioneer in Shanghai” in 2015.