De Kai - Participant

De Kai, author of the forthcoming book Artificial Children, was one of eight members selected by Google for its AI ethics council, ATEAC (Advanced Technology External Advisory Council).

De Kai is among only 17 scientists worldwide named by the Association for Computational Linguistics as a Founding ACL Fellow, for his pioneering contributions to machine translation and machine learning foundations of systems like  Google/Yahoo/Microsoft translators.

His cross-disciplinary work in cognition, language, and music centers on exponentially ramping up our societies’ cultural understanding and will for sustainability action. De Kai’s university AI labs and non-profit are working with the UN to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals.

De Kai is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.

Recruited as founding faculty of HKUST directly from UC Berkeley, where his PhD thesis was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward machine learning based natural language processing AI, he founded HKUST's internationally funded Human Language Technology Center which launched the world's first web translator over twenty years ago.

His AI and machine learning research spans natural language processing, language technology, music technology, computational creativity, and social and ethical AI.

De Kai holds a Kellogg-HKUST Executive MBA and a BS in Computer Engineering from UCSD (Revelle award and cum laude). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and has been a researcher at Columbia University, Bell Laboratories, and TU Munich. He has served as Associate Editor or on the Editorial Boards of AI Journal, Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, Computer Speech and Language, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and Journal of Natural Language Engineering, as well as on the ACL Executive Committee.

In 2015, Debrett's HK 100 recognized him as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong.