Portrait of Jianfeng Gao

Jianfeng Gao

Distinguished Scientist & Vice President

About

Distinguished Scientist & Vice President at Microsoft Research. IEEE Fellow. ACM Distinguished Member.

I am leading the Deep Learning Group. 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, DeBERTa, 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, AI for Code, etc.
  • Vision-language grounding and understanding. Some ongoing projects are vision-language pre-training, OSCAR, VIVO, VinVL, vision language navigation, image editing and generation, image commenting and captioning, etc.
  • Conversational AI. Some ongoing projects are conversation learner and SOLOIST which enable 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

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!