Kai Fu Lee

Dr. Lee, 47, was born in Taiwan and grew up in the United States. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University (summa cum laude, 1983), and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At Carnegie Mellon, he developed the first speaker-independent speech recognition system that was selected as the "Most Important Innovation" in 1988 by BusinessWeek. In 1989, he developed an Othello-playing computer program that defeated the world`s human champion. After teaching for two years at CMU, Dr. Lee joined Apple in 1990, where he became the Vice President of its Interactive Media Group, which developed QuickTime and other technologies. In 1996, Dr. Lee joined Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) where he served as Vice President of the Web Products Division, which developed a $200 million product line of web servers, and also started Cosmo Software. In 1998, he joined Microsoft where he built from the ground up Microsoft Research Asia, one of the world`s top research labs. MIT Technology Review calls this research lab "the hottest computer science laboratory." Dr. Lee was promoted to Corporate Vice President in 2000, and he returned to the United States to co-lead Microsoft`s .Net effort. In the fall of 2005, Dr. Lee joined Google to become a Vice President and President of Google Greater China.