Jianfeng Gao
Distinguished Scientist & Vice President
About
Distinguished Scientist & Vice President at Microsoft, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and AAIA Fellow.
I am leading the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. The group’s mission is to advance the state-of-the-art on deep learning and its application to natural language and image understanding, and for making progress on conversational models and methods. Our research areas are:
- Neural language modeling for natural language understanding and generation. We have developed the first AI models (e.g., MT-DNN, UniLM, DeBERTa) that surpass human performance on public benchmarks.
- Building large-scale foundation models that power MS AI products.
- Building self-improving AI agents where LLMs/LMMs (e.g., GPT4) are augmented and adapted for developing MS commercial AI systems.
- Developing next-generation AI models, e.g., neural symbolic computing to bridge gap between neural and symbolic representations with neural symbols, and cost-effective modeling using neuroscience-inspired methods.
From 2014 to 2018, I was Partner Research Manager in Business AI at Microsoft AI & Research and at Deep Learning Technology Center (DLTC) at Microsoft Research, Redmond. I lead the development of AI solutions to Predictive Sales and Marketing. I also work on deep learning solutions for text and image processing (e.g., DSSM), machine reading comprehension, neural response generation for social bots, and reinforcement learning for task-oriented dialog systems.
From 2006 to 2014, I was Principal Researcher at Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. I worked on Web search, query understanding and reformulation, ads prediction, and statistical machine translation.
From 2005 to 2006, I was a research lead in Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft. I worked on Project X, an effort of developing natural user interface for Windows.
From 1999 to 2005, I was Research Lead in Natural Language Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia. I, together with my colleagues, developed the first Chinese speech recognition system released with Microsoft Office, the Chinese/Japanese Input Method Editors (IME) which were the leading products in the market, and the natural language platform for Windows Vista.
Currently, I live with my family in Woodinville, WA.
Microsoft Research Podcast
Going deep on deep learning with Dr. Jianfeng Gao
Episode 104 | January 29, 2020 - Dr. Jianfeng Gao is a veteran computer scientist, an IEEE Fellow and the current head of the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. He and his team are exploring novel approaches to advancing the state-of-the-art on deep learning in areas like NLP, computer vision, multi-modal intelligence and conversational AI. On the podcast, Dr. Gao gives us an overview of the deep learning landscape and talks about his latest work on Multi-task Deep Neural Networks, Unified Language Modeling and vision-language pre-training. He also unpacks the science behind task-oriented dialog systems as well as social chatbots like Microsoft Xiaoice, and gives us some great book recommendations along the way!