Jianfeng Gao at Microsoft Research

Partner Research Manager

About

Partner Research Manager in the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research AI. IEEE Fellow.

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 interests are:

Neural language modeling for natural language understanding and generation. Some ongoing projects are MT-DNN, UniLM, question-answering, long text generation, etc.
Neural symbolic computing. We are developing next-generation architectures to bridge gap between neural and symbolic representations with neural symbols. Some ongoing projects are relational encoding using Tensor-Product Representations, text-to-code, etc.
Vision-language grounding and understanding. Some ongoing projects are vision-language pre-training, vision language navigation, image editing and generation, image commenting and captioning, etc.
Conversational AI. Some ongoing projects are conversation learner which enables you to build task-oriented dialog system via machine teaching, <a

Partner Research Manager in the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research AI. IEEE Fellow.

Neural language modeling for natural language understanding and generation. Some ongoing projects are MT-DNN, UniLM, question-answering, long text generation, etc.
Neural symbolic computing. We are developing next-generation architectures to bridge gap between neural and symbolic representations with neural symbols. Some ongoing projects are relational encoding using Tensor-Product Representations, text-to-code, etc.
Vision-language grounding and understanding. Some ongoing projects are vision-language pre-training, vision language navigation, image editing and generation, image commenting and captioning, etc.
Conversational AI. Some ongoing projects are conversation learner which enables you to build task-oriented dialog system via machine teaching, ConvLab which is an open-source multi-domain dialog system platform, and response generation for social bots such as Microsoft XiaoIce, etc.

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!