Jianfeng Gao

Partner Research Manager in Business AI at Microsoft AI & Research. From 2014 to 2017, I was Partner Research Manager 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 for text and image processing (see our ACL/SIGIR2018 Tutorial, DeepLearning2017 Tutorial and IJCAI2016 Tutorial or MS internal site) and lead the development of AI systems for dialogue, machine reading comprehension (MRC), and question answering (QA).

Michel Galley, Lihong Li and I gave the tutorial “Neural Approaches to Conversational AI” at ACL 2018 and SIGIR 2018 (slides deck and tech report).  Welcome to register knowledge-grounded conversation challenge at DSTC7 and end-to-end task-completion dialogue system challenge at SLT2018.

DSSM [project site]: We have developed a series of deep semantic similarity models (DSSM, also a.k.a. Sent2Vec), which have been used for many text and image processing tasks, including web search [Huang et al. 2013, Shen et al. 2014], recommendation [Gao et al. 2014a], machine translation [Gao et al. 2014b], and QA [Yih et al. 2015].

MRC [project site]: We released a new MRC dataset, called MS MARCO; and have developed a series of reasoning networks for MRC, aka ReasoNet, ReasoNet with shared memory, and SAN.

Dialogue: We have developed neural network models for social bots trained on Twitter data [project site] and task-oriented bots [project site] trained via reinforcement learning using a user simulator. See our ACL/SIGIR 2018 tutorial “Neural Approaches to Conversational AI”

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.