De Kai

De Kai is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. Recognized for significant contributions to artificial intelligence as a Founding ACL Fellow by the Association for Computational Linguistics, he is celebrated for pioneering the machine translation and machine learning foundations of systems like the Google/Yahoo/Microsoft translators. His role as founding faculty at HKUST led him to establish the Human Language Technology Center, which launched the world's first web translator over twenty years ago.

His interdisciplinary work, which intersects music, language, intelligence, and culture, aims to facilitate intercultural understanding from a liberal arts perspective that values creativity across both technical and humanistic dimensions. This ethos is evident from his early career, having worked and traveled extensively in various global cities before his significant contributions at HKUST. His work in machine learning and cognitive relationships between languages has significantly shaped modern machine translation technology, with applications extending into computer music and computational musicology.

De Kai's academic journey began with his doctoral studies in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics at Berkeley, where he engaged in formative projects on intelligent conversational dialog agents. His PhD dissertation introduced the use of maximum entropy to model human perception and interpretation of ambiguities, a pioneering approach that contributed to the current advanced statistical natural language processing technologies. In addition to his technical achievements, De Kai also holds an executive MBA from Kellogg (Northwestern University) and HKUST. He was named one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong by Debrett's HK 100 in 2015 and in 2018, Google appointed him as one of the eight inaugural members of its AI Ethics council, ATEAC. Over the past decade, De Kai has been an active speaker at prominent venues including TEDx and the World Economic Forum, discussing the ethical, societal, and safety implications of AI.