Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Emeritus Researcher
About
Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is a distinguished technology leader with a 28-year career at Microsoft, where he served as Corporate Vice President of the Asia-Pacific R&D Group and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). He played a pivotal role in elevating MSRA to global prominence and established the Microsoft Innovation Partnership Center to advance AI solutions through industry collaboration.
A founder of the Microsoft Search Technology Center, Dr. Hon helped deliver the Bing search stack for Asia-Pacific and previously led Microsoft’s Natural Interaction Service Division, shipping Microsoft Speech Server and the Natural User Interface platform. Earlier in his career, he was Technology Director at Apple for the Chinese Dictation Kit. An IEEE Fellow, he has authored over 200 publications and holds 45 U.S. patents.
Dr. Hon currently serves as an independent board member of MediaTek and Ambarella, advising on AI, SoC, and product strategy. He is also a Vice-Chancellor Visiting Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University under Turing Award laureate Raj Reddy and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University. His work in speech recognition, natural language processing, and internet search has influenced products and platforms used by hundreds of millions worldwide.
Featured content
Celebrating 20 years of MSR in Asia with Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Episode 49, November 7, 2018 - In 1998, Microsoft Research opened a small lab in Beijing to expand its research efforts and draw on the immense high-tech talent pool in China. No one expected that only twenty years later, Microsoft Research Asia would become the dynamic organization it is today, with innovative research contributing to nearly every part of Microsoft’s business. Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon has watched it grow from the beginning and this year, celebrates the lab’s 20th anniversary as Managing Director, Corporate Vice President and Chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D Group.