Xuedong David
Huang is also known as XD because his email is xdh. Huang’s current responsibility at
Microsoft is to incubate new businesses that would drive Microsoft's future
growth. Before he took the incubation GM job in October 2004, Huang was the
general manager of Microsoft's Speech Platforms Group overseeing the product
development, research, marketing, and business development of Microsoft’s
speech technologies. Huang founded Microsoft’s speech technology and business
units that shipped core speech technologies across Microsoft’s product lines
(Server, Windows, Office, and Mobility).
In 1978 Huang
was admitted to Hunan University in his beautiful home town Changsha, China
when he was 15. Driven by working with world-class teams, Huang went to
Beijing's Tsinghua University for his graduate study on Artificial
Intelligence. He moved to Scotland and finished his PhD work on speech
technology in less than 2 years at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD thesis
work won IEEE’s prestigious Paper Award. Before recruited by MS in 1993,
Huang led the Carnegie Mellon University team achieving not only the best
system in 1992's DARPA speech benchmarking but also the most dramatic error
reduction in the history of DARPA's speech evaluations. Huang and his team
received 1992 Alan Newell research excellence medal. Huang was also recognized
multiple times as the top 10 leaders of the speech industry by
SpeechTek.
He cares deeply
about the community and co-established "Spoken Language Processing
Grant" with Alex Acero and Hsiao-Wuen Hon at IEEE to provide financial
aids for students to travel to IEEE-sponsored conferences. He also serves in
the IT advisory board for the Governor of Hunan, China, as well as the Honorary
Dean/Professor of Institute of Software Engineering at Hunan University, where
he grew up and had his wonderful childhood there. He is married to Yingzhi Zhou
when he studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing and is the proud father of
Angela, Christina, and Derek. He enjoys watercolor painting in his spare time,
partly inspired by his Hunan artistic friends.