Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia

Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, located in Beijing, China. Founded in 1998, Microsoft Research Asia has since become one of the best research centers in the world that MIT Technology Review called “the hottest computer science research lab in the world.” Dr. Hon oversees the lab’s research activities and collaborations with academia in Asia Pacific.

An IEEE fellow and a Distinguished Scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. He serves on the editorial board of the international journal of the Communication of the ACM. Dr. Hon has published more than 100 technical papers in international journals and at conferences. He co-authored a book, Spoken Language Processing, which is a graduate-level textbook and reference book in the area of speech technology in many universities all over the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozens of patents in several technical areas.

Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as a Deputy Managing Director, responsible for research in Internet search, speech & natural language, system, wireless and networking. In addition, he founded and managed search technology center (STC) from 2005 to 2007, the Microsoft internet Search product (Bing) development in Asia Pacific.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Hon was the founding member and architect in Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. Besides overseeing all architectural and technical aspects of the award winning Microsoft^® Speech Server product (Frost & Sullivan's 2005 Enterprise Infrastructure Product of the Year Award, Speech Technology Magazine’s 2004 Most Innovative Solutions Awards and VSLive! 2004 Editors Choice Award.), Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he is also responsible for managing and delivering statistical learning technologies and advanced search. Dr. Hon joined Microsoft Research as a senior researcher at 1995 and has been a key contributor of Microsoft's SAPI and speech engine technologies. He previously worked at Apple Computer, where he led research and development for Apple's' Chinese Dictation Kit.

Dr. Hon received Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University. 

Selective Publications

• R. Song, Q. Guo, R. Zhang, G. Xin, J. Wen, Y. Yu, HW Hon, “Select-the-Best-Ones: A new way to judge relative relevance”, book chapter (14) of Information Processing & Management, Elsevier, March 2010
• R. Song, Z. Luo, J. Nie, Y. Yu, and HW Hon, Identification of ambiguous queries in web search, International Journal on Information Processing and Management, Volume 45 , Issue 2 , March 2009, pp. 216-229
• B Erol, J Luo, SF Chang, M Etoh, HW Hon, Q. Lin, V. Setlur, Mobile Media Search: Has Media Search Finally Found its Perfect Platform?, in ACM Multimedia 2009, oct. 19-23, 2009.
• J Cohen, M Etoh, HW Hon, J Luo, J. Schalkwyk. Mobile Multimedia Search, in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, April 19-24, 2009.
• Y. Cao, C.Y. Lin, Y. Yu, and H.W. Hon. Recommending Questions Using the MDL-based Tree Cut Model, in Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), Beijing, China, April 21-25, 2008.
• R. Song, M. J. Taylor, J. Wen, HW Hon, and Y. Yu. Viewing Term Proximity from a Different Perspective. Book chapter in book: Advances in Information Retrieval by Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, page 346-357, 2008.
• W. Gao, C. Niu, J.-Y. Nie, M. Zhou, J. Hu, K.-F. Wong, and H.-W. Hon. Cross-lingual Query Suggestion Using Query Logs of Different Languages., In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007
• R Song, Z Luo, JR Wen, Y Yu, and HW Hon, Identify Ambiguous Queries in Web Search. In Proceedings of WWW 2007, pages 1169-1170. [10]M. Winaver, O. Kurland, and C. Domshlak.
• J. Zhu, Z. Nie, J. Wen, B. Zhang and HW Hon, Webpage Understanding: An Integrated Approach, The 13th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD 2007)
• Hua-Jun Zeng, Benyu Zhang, Zheng Chen, Wei-Ying Ma, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Daniel B. Cook, Gabor Hirschler, Karen Fries, and Kurt Samuelson, Content propagation for enhanced document retrieval, no. 7305389, January 2007
• Hua-Jun Zeng, Benyu Zhang, Zheng Chen, Wei-Ying Ma, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Daniel B. Cook, Gabor Hirschler, Karen Fries, and Kurt Samuelson, Enhanced document retrieval, no. 7289985, January 2007
• Yunbo Cao, Jun Xu, Tie-Yan Liu, Hang Li, Yalou Huang, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon, An Ordinal Regression Method for Document Retrieval, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 2006
• Min Zhao, Hang Li, Adwait Ratnaparkhi, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, and Jue Wang, Adapting Document Ranking to Users' Preferences using Click-through Data, no. MSR-TR-2006-15, February 2006
• Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Multimedia search - Microsoft's perspective, Multi-Media Modeling Conference Proceedings, July 2006 12th International
• Li Deng, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Hsiao Hon, Jasha Droppo, C. Boulis, Derek Jacoby, Milind Mahajan, Ciprian Chelba, and Xuedong Huang, Speech and language processing for multimodal human-computer interaction (Invited Article) , in Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (Special issue on Real-World Speech Processing), vol. 36, no. 2-3, pp. 161 - 187, Kluwer Academic , 2004
• Li Deng, Alex Acero, Ye-Yi Wang, Kuansan Wang, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Milind Mahajan, and XD Huang, A speech-centric perspective for human-computer interface, in Proc. of the IEEE Fifth Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., December 2002
• Li Deng, Kuansan Wang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Jasha Droppo, Constantinos Boulis, Ye-Yi Wang, Derek Jacoby, Milind Mahajan, Ciprian Chelba, and Xuedong D. Huang, Distributed Speech Processing in MiPad’s Multimodal User Interface, in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 605-619, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 2002
• Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Spoken Language Processing, pp. 1008, Prentice-Hall, May 2001
• Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, C. Chelba, Li Deng, Jasha Droppo, D. Duchene, J. Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, D. Jacoby, L. Jiang, R. Loynd, Milind Mahajan, P. Mau, S. Meredith, S. Mughal, S. Neto, M. Plumpe, K. Stery, G. Venolia, Kuansan Wang, and Ye-Yi Wang, MIPAD: A Multimodal Interactive Prototype, in International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 2001
• Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Ciprian Chelba, Li Deng, Doug Duchene, Joshua Goodman, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Derek Jacoby, Li Jiang, Ricky Loynd, Milind Mahajan, Peter Mau, Scott Meredith, Salman Mughal, Salvado Neto, Mike Plumpe, Kuansan Wang, and Ye-Yi Wang, MiPad: A Next Generation PDA Prototype, in International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, International Speech Communication Association, Beijing, China, 2000
• Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Alex Acero, Xuedong Huang, J. Liu, and M. Plumpe, Automatic Generation of Synthesis Units for Trainable Text-to-Speech Systems, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, December 1998
• M. Plumpe, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, and Xuedong Huang, HMM-Based Smoothing for Concatenative Speech Synthesis, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, December 1998
• Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Yun-Cheng Ju, and Keiko Otani, Japanese Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition System Based on Microsoft Whisper , International Speech Communication Association, 1998
• X. D. Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Yun-Cheng Ju, J. Liu, S. Meredith, and M. Plumpe, Recent Improvements on Microsofts Trainable Text-to-Speech System: Whistler, in Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 1997