Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is corporate vice president of Microsoft, chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D Group, and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. He drives Microsoft’s strategy for research and development activities in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as collaborations with academia.

Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as deputy managing director, stepping into the role of managing director in 2007. He founded and managed Microsoft Search Technology Center from 2005 to 2007 and led development of Microsoft’s search products (Bing) in Asia-Pacific. In 2014, Dr. Hon was appointed as chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Hon was the founding member and architect of the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. Besides overseeing architectural and technical aspects of the award-winning Microsoft Speech Server product, Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he was also responsible for managing and delivering statistical learning technologies and advanced search. Dr. Hon joined Microsoft Research as a senior researcher in 1995 and has been a key contributor to Microsoft's SAPI and speech engine technologies. He previously worked at Apple, where he led research and development for Apple's Chinese Dictation Kit.

An IEEE Fellow and a distinguished scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. Dr. Hon has published more than 100 technical papers in international journals and at conferences. He co-authored a book, Spoken Language Processing, which is a graduate-level textbook and reference book in the area of speech technology used in universities around the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozen patents in several technical areas.

Dr. Hon received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.

Whisper: Windows Highly Intelligent Speech Recognizer

Established: December 16, 2008

Our first ASR system We are trying to perfect the ability of computers to recognize human speech by building speech and language models that are accurate, efficient, and easy to use. Our goal is to make human-computer interaction more natural. Our speech recognition engine, code-named Whisper (Windows Highly Intelligent SPEech Recognizer), offers state-of-the-art speaker-independent continuous speech recognition. The Whisper speech engine has been shipped by our Speech Products Group as part of the SAPI SDK, which…

MiPad

Established: February 19, 2002

Your Pad or MiPad It only took one scientist mumbling at a monitor to give birth to the idea that a computer should be able to listen, understand, and even talk back. But years of effort haven't gotten us closer to the Jetson dream: a computer that listens better than your spouse, better than your boss, and even better than your dog Spot. Using state-of-the-art speech recognition, and strengthening this new science with pen input,…

Whistler Text-to-Speech Engine

Established: November 5, 2001

The talking computer HAL in the 1968 film "2001-A Space Odyssey" had an almost human voice, but it was the voice of an actor, not a computer. Getting a real computer to talk like HAL has proven one of the toughest problems posed by "2001." Microsoft's contribution to this field is "Whistler" (Windows Highly Intelligent STochastic taLkER), a trainable text-to-speech engine which was released in 1998 as part of the SAPI4.0 SDK, and then as…

Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services

Jing Liu, Quan Wang, Chin-Yew Lin, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, ACL – Association for Computational Linguistics, October 18, 2013, View abstract, Download PDF, View external link

What’s in a name?: an unsupervised approach to link users across communities

Jing Liu, Fan Zhang, Xinying Song, Young-In Song, Chin-Yew Lin, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, ACM – Association for Computing Machinery, February 4, 2013, View abstract, Download PDF, View external link

A Proximity Probabilistic Model for Information Retrieval

Ruihua Song, Liqian Yu, Ji-Rong Wen, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Microsoft Research, January 30, 2011, View abstract, Download PDF

Select-the-Best-Ones: A New Way to Judge Relative Relevance

Ruihua Song, Qingwei Guo, Ruochi Zhang, Guomao Xin, Ji-Rong Wen, Yong Yu, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, January 1, 2011, View abstract, View external link

Automatic extraction of web data records containing user-generated content

Xinying Song, Jing Liu, Yunbo Cao, Chin-Yew Lin, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, ACM – Association for Computing Machinery, October 26, 2010, View abstract, Download PDF, View external link

Identification of Ambiguous Queries in Web Search

Ruihua Song, Zhenxiao Luo, Jian-Yun Nie, Yong Yu, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Elsevier, March 1, 2009, View abstract, View external link

Recommending Questions Using the MDL-based Tree Cut Model

Yunbo Cao, Huizhong Duan, Chin-Yew Lin, Yong Yu, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in WWW '08 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, ACM, April 21, 2008, View abstract, View external link

Viewing Term Proximity from a Different Perspective

Ruihua Song, Ji-Rong Wen, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Yong Yu, Michael Taylor, Mike Taylor, in Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR'08), January 1, 2008, View abstract

Identify Ambiguous Queries in Web Search

Ruihua Song, Zhenxiao Luo, Ji-Rong Wen, Yong Yu, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in WWW '07 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, ACM Press, January 1, 2007, View abstract, View external link

Webpage Understanding: An Integrated Approach

Jun Zhu, Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen, Bo Zhang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, January 1, 2007, View abstract, Download PDF

Adapting Ranking SVM to Document Retrieval

Yunbo Cao, Jun Xu, Tie-Yan Liu, Hang Li, Yalou Huang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, in SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM, August 6, 2006, View abstract, View external link

Adapting Document Ranking to Users’ Preferences using Click-through Data

Min Zhao, Hang Li, Adwait Ratnaparkhi, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jue Wang, February 1, 2006, View abstract, Download PDF

Speech and Language Processing for Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction (Invited Article)

Li Deng, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Jasha Droppo, Milind Mahajan, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Xuedong Huang, Kluwer Academic, January 1, 2004, View abstract, Download PDF

A Speech-Centric Perspective for Human-Computer Interface

Li Deng, Alex Acero, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Milind Mahajan, Xuedong Huang, in Proc. of the IEEE Fifth Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., December 1, 2002, View abstract, Download PDF

Distributed Speech Processing in MiPad’s Multimodal User Interface

Li Deng, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Milind Mahajan, Xuedong Huang, Constantinos Boulis, Ye-Yi Wang, Derek Jacoby, Milind Mahajan, Ciprian Chelba, Xuedong D. Huang, in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., January 1, 2002, View abstract, Download PDF

Spoken Language Processing

Alex Acero, Xuedong Huang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Prentice-Hall, May 1, 2001, View abstract, View external link

MIPAD: A Multimodal Interactive Prototype

Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, C. Chelba, Li Deng, Jasha Droppo, D. Duchene, J. Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, D. Jacoby, L. Jiang, Ricky Loynd, Milind Mahajan, P. Mau, S. Meredith, S. Mughal, S. Neto, M. Plumpe, K. Steury, Gina Venolia, Kuansan Wang, Ye-Yi Wang, in International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., January 1, 2001, View abstract, Download PDF

MiPad: A Next Generation PDA Prototype

Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, C. Chelba, Li Deng, Doug Duchene, J. Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, D. Jacoby, Li Jiang, Ricky Loynd, Milind Mahajan, P. Mau, S. Meredith, Salman Mughal, S. Neto, M. Plumpe, Kuansan Wang, Ye-Yi Wang, in International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, International Speech Communication Association, January 1, 2000, View abstract, Download PDF

Automatic Generation of Synthesis Units for Trainable Text-to-Speech Systems

Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Alex Acero, Xuedong Huang, J. Liu, M. Plumpe, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, December 1, 1998, View abstract, Download PDF

HMM-Based Smoothing for Concatenative Speech Synthesis

Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Xuedong Huang, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, December 1, 1998, View abstract, Download PDF

Japanese Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition System Based on Microsoft Whisper

Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Yun-Cheng Ju, Keiko Otani, Y. C. Ju, International Speech Communication Association, January 1, 1998, View abstract

Recent Improvements on Microsofts Trainable Text-to-Speech System: Whistler

Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Y. C. Ju, J. Liu, S. Meredith, M. Plumpe, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 1, 1997, View abstract, Download PDF

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence, Agglomerative Intelligence, Adaptive Intelligence, and Ambient I

November 6, 2015

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Do More, Know More, and Be More through Computational Living

November 6, 2014

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Welcome and Microsoft Research Asia Update

October 30, 2014

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

The Dunhuang Heritage: Digital Preservations and Challenges

July 17, 2013

Speakers

Mimi Gardner Gates, Curtis Wong, Xudong Wang, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Affiliation

Seattle Art Museum, Microsoft Research, Dunhuang Academy, Microsoft Research Asia

Asia Faculty Summit 2012 Highlights

October 26, 2012

Speakers

Eric Horvitz, Hong Tan, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jeannette Wing, Lolan Song, and Rick Rashid

Affiliation

Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft Research Redmond

Microsoft Research Asia Update

October 26, 2012

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Affiliation

Microsoft Research Asia

FestSchrift Session 4: More Microsoft Research

March 9, 2012

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon, P. Anandan, Jennifer Chayes, Christian Borgs, and Gordon Bell

Affiliation

MSR India, MSR New England, Deputy Managing Director

Speakers

Rick Rashid, Hsiao-Wuen Hon

TechVista 2010 – Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon

February 2, 2010

Speakers

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Selective Publications

R. Song, Q. Guo, R. Zhang, G. Xin, J. Wen, Y. Yu, HW Hon, “Select-the-Best-Ones: A new way to judge relative relevance”, book chapter (14) of Information Processing & Management, Elsevier, March 2010
B Erol, J Luo, SF Chang, M Etoh, HW Hon, Q. Lin, V. Setlur, Mobile Media Search: Has Media Search Finally Found its Perfect Platform?, in ACM Multimedia 2009, oct. 19-23, 2009.
J Cohen, M Etoh, HW Hon, J Luo, J. Schalkwyk. Mobile Multimedia Search, in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, April 19-24, 2009.
Y. Cao, C.Y. Lin, Y. Yu, and H.W. Hon. Recommending Questions Using the MDL-based Tree Cut Model, in Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), Beijing, China, April 21-25, 2008.
W. Gao, C. Niu, J.-Y. Nie, M. Zhou, J. Hu, K.-F. Wong, and H.-W. Hon. Cross-lingual Query Suggestion Using Query Logs of Different Languages., In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007
J. Zhu, Z. Nie, J. Wen, B. Zhang and HW Hon, Webpage Understanding: An Integrated Approach, The 13th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD 2006
Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Multimedia search – Microsoft’s perspective, Multi-Media Modeling Conference Proceedings, July 2006 12th International
Li Deng, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Hsiao Hon, Jasha Droppo, C. Boulis, Derek Jacoby, Milind Mahajan, Ciprian Chelba, and Xuedong Huang, Speech and language processing for multimodal human-computer interaction (Invited Article) , in Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (Special issue on Real-World Speech Processing), vol. 36, no. 2-3, pp. 161 – 187, Kluwer Academic , 2004
Li Deng, Alex Acero, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Milind Mahajan, and XD Huang, A speech-centric perspective for human-computer interface, in Proc. of the IEEE Fifth Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., December 2002
Li Deng, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Constantinos Boulis, Ye-Yi Wang, Derek Jacoby, Milind Mahajan, Ciprian Chelba, and Xuedong D. Huang, Distributed Speech Processing in MiPad’s Multimodal User Interface, in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 605-619, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 2002
Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Spoken Language Processing, pp. 1008, Prentice-Hall, May 2001
Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, C. Chelba, Li Deng, Jasha Droppo, D. Duchene, J. Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, D. Jacoby, L. Jiang, R. Loynd, Milind Mahajan, P. Mau, S. Meredith, S. Mughal, S. Neto, M. Plumpe, K. Stery, G. Venolia, Kuansan Wang, and Ye-Yi Wang, MIPAD: A Multimodal Interactive Prototype, in International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 2001
Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Ciprian Chelba, Li Deng, Doug Duchene, Joshua Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Derek Jacoby, Li Jiang, Ricky Loynd, Milind Mahajan, Peter Mau, Scott Meredith, Salman Mughal, Salvado Neto, Mike Plumpe, Kuansan Wang, and Ye-Yi Wang, MiPad: A Next Generation PDA Prototype, in International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, International Speech Communication Association, Beijing, China, 2000
Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Alex Acero, Xuedong Huang, J. Liu, and M. Plumpe, Automatic Generation of Synthesis Units for Trainable Text-to-Speech Systems, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, December 1998
M. Plumpe, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, and Xuedong Huang, HMM-Based Smoothing for Concatenative Speech Synthesis, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, December 1998
X. D. Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Yun-Cheng Ju, J. Liu, S. Meredith, and M. Plumpe, Recent Improvements on Microsofts Trainable Text-to-Speech System: Whistler, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 1997

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