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Kai-Fu Lee (simplified Chinese: 李开复; traditional Chinese: 李開復; pinyin: Lǐ Kāifù; born December 3, 1961) is an American venture capitalist, technology executive, writer, and computer scientist. He is currently based in Beijing, China.
Lee developed the world's first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon. He later became a high-technology executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft, and Google.
He became the focus of a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft, his former employer, due to a one-year non-compete agreement that he signed with Microsoft in 2000 when he became its corporate vice president of interactive services.
One of the most prominent figures in the Chinese internet sector, he was the founding president of Google China, serving from July 2005 through September 4, 2009. He has created personal website, 'Woxuewang' (Chinese: 我学网) dedicated to helping young Chinese people achieve in their studies and careers.. He is one of the most followed micro-bloggers in China, in particular on Sina Weibo, where he has over fifty million followers.
Background
Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China.
Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.
Career
Education
In 1973, Lee immigrated to the United States and attended high school in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University, earning a B.S. degree in computer science in 1983. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.
Academic research
At Carnegie Mellon, Lee worked on topics in machine learning and pattern recognition. In 1986, he and Sanjoy Mahajan developed Bill, a Bayesian learning-based system for playing the board game Othello that won the US national tournament of computer players in 1989. In 1988, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Sphinx, the first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system.
Lee has written two books on speech recognition and more than 60 papers in computer science. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1988 as a Kluwer monograph, Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System (ISBN 0898382963). Together with Alex Waibel, another Carnegie Mellon researcher, Lee edited Readings in Speech Recognition (1990, ISBN 1-55860-124-4).
Apple, Silicon Graphics, and Microsoft
After two years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, Lee joined Apple Computer in 1990 as a principal research scientist. While at Apple (1990–1996), he headed R&D groups responsible for Apple Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper (speech interface), GalaTea (text to speech system) for Mac Computers.
Lee moved to Silicon Graphics in 1996 and spent a year as the Vice President of its Web Products division, and another year as president of its multimedia software division, Cosmo Software.
In 1998, Lee moved to Microsoft and went to Beijing, China where he played a key role in establishing the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. MSR China later became known as MSR Asia, regarded as one of the best computer science research labs in the world. Lee returned to the United States in 2000 and was vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft from 2000 to 2005.
Move from Microsoft to Google
In July 2005, Lee left Microsoft to take a position at Google. The search company agreed to compensation worth in excess of $10 million, including a $2.5 million cash 'signing bonus' and another $1.5 million cash payment after one year, a package referred to internally at Google as 'unprecedented'.
On July 19, 2005, Microsoft sued Google and Lee in a Washington state court over Google's hiring of its former Vice President of Interactive Services, claiming that Lee was violating his non-compete agreement by working for Google within one year of leaving the Redmond-based software corporation. Microsoft argued that Lee would inevitably disclose proprietary information to Google if he was allowed to work there.
On July 28, 2005, Washington state Superior Court Judge Steven González granted Microsoft a temporary restraining order, which prohibited Lee from working on Google projects that compete with Microsoft pending a trial scheduled for January 9, 2006. On September 13, following a hearing, Judge González issued a ruling permitting Lee to work for Google, but barring him from starting work on some technical projects until the case goes to trial in January 2006. Lee was still allowed to recruit employees for Google in China and to talk to government officials about licensing, but was prohibited from working on technologies such as search or speech. Lee was also prohibited from setting budgets, salaries, and research directions for Google in China until the case was to go to trial in January 2006.
Before the case could go to trial, on December 22, 2005 Google and Microsoft announced that they had reached a settlement whose terms are confidential, ending a five-month dispute between the two companies.
At Google China, Lee helped establish the company in the market and overseen its growth in the country. He was responsible for launching the Google.cn regional website, and strengthened the company's teams of engineers and scientists in the country.
On September 4, 2009, Lee announced his resignation from Google. He said “With a very strong leadership team in place, it seemed a very good moment for me to move to the next chapter in my career.” Alan Eustace, senior Google vice-president for engineering, credited him with "helping dramatically to improve the quality and range of services that we offer in China, and ensuring that we continue to innovate on the Web for the benefit of users and advertisers". Two executives in the company have taken over Lee's roles, Boon-Lock Yeo, who is now working as director of Google’s Shanghai engineering office, will take over the engineering department, and John Liu, VP of sales and operations, will assume the business and operations side.
Several months after Lee's departure, Google announced that it would stop censorship and move its mainland China servers to Hong Kong.
Sinovation Ventures
On September 7, 2009 he announced details of a $115m venture capital (early-stage incubation and seed money business model) fund called "Innovation Works" (later changed to "Sinovation Ventures") that aims to create five successful Chinese start-ups a year in internet and mobile internet businesses or in vast hosting services known as cloud computing. The Innovation Works fund has attracted several investors, including Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube; Foxconn, the electronics contract manufacturer; Legend Holdings, the parent of PC maker Lenovo; and WI Harper Group.
In September 2010, Lee described two Google Android projects for Chinese users: Tapas, a smart-phone operating system tailored for Chinese users and Wandoujia (SnapPea), a desktop phone manager for Android.
In December 2012, Innovation Works announced that it had closed a second $275 million fund.
Previous jobs
- Vice President, Google; President, Google Greater China, July 2005 - September 4, 2009
- Corporate Vice President, Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD), Microsoft Corp. 2000 - July 2005
- Founder & Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia, China, 1998–2000
- President, Cosmo Software, Multimedia software business unit of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), 1999-2000
- Vice President & General Manager, Web Products, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), 1998-1999
- Vice President, Interactive Media Group, Apple Computer, 1997-1998
- Director, Interactive Media, Advanced Technology Group, Apple Computer, 1994-1997
- Manager, Speech & Language Technologies Group, Apple Computer, 1991-1994
- Principal Speech Scientist, Apple Computer, 1990 - 1991
- Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, July 1990
- Research Computer Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University, 1988–1990
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1988
- B.S. in Computer Science, Columbia University, 1983
Membership
- Fellow, IEEE (inducted 2002)
- Member, Committee of 100
- Time 100, 2013
- "The 2013 TIME 100". The Times. April 18, 2013. Retrieved May 18, 2013.
Others
Barred From Weibo
Lee was barred from Weibo for three days from posting on local micro-blogging sites, where he at the time had more than 30 million followers. Lee has used Weibo to complain about China’s Internet controls. A February 16, 2013 post summarized a Wall Street Journal article about how slow speeds and instability deter overseas businesses from locating critical functions in China. In January 2013, he also posted support for staff of a Guangzhou-based newspaper during a standoff with government censors.
Lymphoma
Lee posted on Weibo on September 5, 2013 revealing that he was diagnosed with Lymphoma.