History of Speech and Language Technology

Xuedong (XD) Huang is the General Manager for "Incubation" at Microsoft Research. After attending Hunan University in China, Huang received his masters degree from Beijing's Tsinghua University for his work in Artificial Intelligence. He then went to Scotland where he completed his PhD work on speech technology at the University of Edinburgh. As a member of the faculty of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Sciences, he directed the development of CMU's Sphinx-II speech recognition system. He was then hired in 1993 by Microsoft Research where he directed the formation of Microsoft's Speech Technology Group, becoming General Manager of the Speech Platforms Group in 2000. He is a co-author of two books: Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition (1990) and Spoken Language Processing (2001).

Additional information on Dr. Huang be found at:
http://research.microsoft.com/srg/xdh/
and at:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/h/Huang:Xuedong.html

An interview was conducted with Dr. Huang at Interspeech 2005, the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal, September 4-8, 2005, by Dr. Janet Baker. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but a brief excerpt of the recorded interview is available.

Brief excerpt of recorded interview.