Dr. Kai-Fu Lee Corporate Vice President   Natural Interactive Services Division Microsoft Corporation

As corporate vice president of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD), Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is responsible for the development of the technologies and services for making web interaction and navigation simpler and more natural. NISD includes the Speech, Natural Language, Search and Navigation Services, and Search Companion Project groups. 

Kai-Fu Lee joined Microsoft in 1998 as the managing director of Microsoft Research, China. Lee is widely known for his pioneering work in the areas of speech recognition, artificial intelligence, 3-D graphics and Internet multimedia. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was the president of Cosmo Software, the Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) multimedia software business unit.  

During his tenure at Cosmo, Lee oversaw the business unit focused on multiplatform Internet 3-D and multimedia software. Before that, he was vice president and general manager of Silicon Graphics’ Web products division, responsible for several product lines and the company’s corporate Web strategy. Before joining SGI, Lee spent six years at Apple, most recently as vice president of the company’s interactive media group, which developed QuickTime, QuickDraw 3D, QuickTime VR and PlainTalk speech technologies. 

Prior to his position at Apple, he was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed the world’s first speaker-independent continuous speech-recognition system. While at Carnegie Mellon, Lee also developed the world-champion computer program that plays the game "Othello" and defeated the human world champion in 1988. Lee holds a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s in computer science with highest honors from Columbia University. Kai-Fu Lee is a Fellow of the IEEE.

The Future of Computing

The Internet has connected computers together, and made rich content accessible to every PC user.  At Microsoft, we believe that we are only at the very beginning of the Internet Revolution.  In the next 5 years, we will continue to see very significant developments.  For example, we expect that:

Ø          Structured data from XML will make the rich content truly accessible. 
Ø          Web services will enable applications that are richer and more numerous than ever imaginable.
Ø          Devices like Tablets, PDAs, and telephones will truly make computing pervasive. 
Ø          Natural user interfaces will evolve to make this connected, structured, web-service-based, multi-device world accessible to everyone. 

 .NET is Microsoft’s effort to develop software for this connected world.  I will describe Microsoft’s vision and efforts that will deliver runtimes, tools, and user experiences that will help improve the way people work, communicate, and interact.