At Microsoft’s rumored Headquarters in Seattle, building 34, several media outlets have begun to take their seats in the conference room. It’s not so much waiting as looking forward. Because the man we’re talking to has just been elected to the American Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors in engineering. He is Shen Xiangyang, the global executive vice president of Microsoft, the only Mainland Chinese in the core management of Microsoft, second only to the CEO, and also the highest Chinese in the American technology industry.

In addition, the media is more willing to let shen share some thoughts and ideas on ARTIFICIAL intelligence. Shen is in charge of the new “ARTIFICIAL Intelligence and Research Division” established by Microsoft in September last year. And, of course, there is a curiosity (or curiosity) about qi Lu, the “most powerful Chinese in Silicon Valley,” leaving Microsoft to join Baidu after shen xiangyang introduced him to Microsoft.

Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include information robot, editing robot, writing robot and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.



As expected, Shen Xiangyang arrived as scheduled. It is said that Shen xiangyang hurried back to Seattle from other places in the morning of the interview, but he was not tired at all when he saw the media and was very excited to introduce the situation of Microsoft campus to everyone. He can always figure out what the press wants and drop a few hints.

“He knows people better.”

It is said that in the Microsoft headquarters campus there is a parking lot closest to the elevator, only four parking Spaces, one of which is Satya Nadella, and another is Shen Xiangyang, enough to prove its position in Microsoft. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 and then joined Microsoft Research. In 2013, he became Executive vice president of Microsoft worldwide, second only to CEO. In 2016, he was responsible for Microsoft’s global AI strategy. Elected to the American Academy of Engineering in 2017, Shen xiangyang’s every step has become a legend.

Despite his high position, Shen has never been arrogant. Employees from Microsoft revealed that Shen xiangyang is very easygoing, and very humorous, dare to self-blackmailing, always like to take the initiative to greet people when they meet on the road. At the same time, Shen xiangyang is very serious in his work. Before the media interview, he specially asked for materials and introductions from all the media and did his homework.

Shortly after he took charge of Microsoft’s ARTIFICIAL intelligence and Research division, the company made a historic breakthrough in speech recognition. Microsoft’s conversational voice recognition technology broke through with a 6.3% error rate in the industry standard Switchboard voice recognition benchmark, meaning Microsoft’s system is now on par with a human expert in speech recognition. Previously, it was more IBM that took the lead in speech recognition.

Huang Xuedong, Microsoft’s chief speech scientist who led the team that made the breakthrough, prefers to give shen the credit when asked why Microsoft was able to make the breakthrough. Huang xuedong only mentioned one sentence: “He knows people better.”

Microsoft staff revealed that Shen Xiangyang did not avoid people, even parachuted into the new team will be able to take the effective soldiers in the past together, but also in-depth understanding of the new team, and the first line of code farmers to talk about the team, catch the problem.

As for Qi Lu, known as “the most powerful Chinese in Silicon Valley”, leaving Microsoft and joining Baidu, Shen xiangyang said, “I can only wish qi Lu the best. I thank him very much for his great contribution to Microsoft over the past eight years, and I am very confident that He will make brilliant achievements in his new position.” It was Shen Xiangyang who recommended Lu Qi to Then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer when he joined the company.

Shen was elected to the Academy of Engineering for his “outstanding contributions to computer vision and graphics, as well as research and development leadership in the industry.”

AlphaGo was admired but not commercialized

Artificial intelligence has become such a buzzword that every CEO of a company can’t be called a technology company if they don’t talk about it. Tech giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft and Intel are jumping into AI. “Ai has actually become a culture. Google will say they are an AI company. Even Salesforce will talk about doing AI and start a program called Einstein.” Shen xiangyang said.

Google is best known for its AlphaGo victory over Lee Se-dol, the South Korean world go champion; Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence assistant, is considered the most innovative first initiative in its 100-year history and represents a phase of human and machine integration. Microsoft set up a separate ai and Research institute…

Shen xiangyang is most excited about the development of AI in two aspects: one is the enhancement of AI capabilities; Another is the overhaul of the human-computer interface.

“Artificial intelligence capabilities are increasing, especially in speech and computer vision. I think that within five years, computer vision will surpass humans. And within 10 years, computer vision recognition will certainly be better than human recognition.” Shen Xiangyang thinks.

As mentioned above, Microsoft’s voice recognition technology has a low error rate of 6.3%, which is on par with a human expert.

“What I’m most excited about is the radical transformation of the so-called human-computer interface.” “No matter how ai is defined, the development of computer science has always been about one thing — human-computer interaction for so many years. This is true of mobile phones and laptops. We’ve been working on how to live and work with computers.”

Shen xiangyang believes that the concept of “user graphical interface” is being overturned, and voice is becoming more and more useful, and video technology will follow in the future. And that’s what Microsoft has been talking about: conversational AI. Such as its xiaona, xiaobing.

Rather than Google’s AlphaGo battling humans in the game of Go, Shen focuses more on ai breakthroughs in business.

“I have nothing but admiration for AlphaGo, which is really amazing. It really breaks a lot of people’s imagination about AI.” “But as great as AlphaGo is, we don’t see its real application in the commercial field. I personally think that in the next three to five years, the breakthrough of ARTIFICIAL intelligence will be applied in the commercial field.”

Specifically, the application of AI in traditional business areas, such as sales marketing, customer support, human resources and so on.

Mr Shen takes marketing as an example. It used to be that selling a product might involve a lot of calls and a very long list of potential customers. In the face of so many customer names and companies, it is necessary to judge who should be contacted first and who should be contacted later in limited time. But with more and more data to look at and analyze, you can use ARTIFICIAL intelligence to increase efficiency fivefold, tenfold.

“Brain science +AI” would be the most meaningful direction

“AlphaGo has proved that machines are better than humans in go. But in the future, AI will not need to prove that it has superior computing power and algorithms, but that it will make breakthroughs in areas that are beyond comprehension, not just emotions.” Shen xiangyang said.

Shen has been emphasizing ai’s “emotional” capabilities over its computing capabilities. He argues that although it is still not clear exactly what emotion is, it is certainly not calculated or calculated. The reason we are intelligent is because we have brains. However, the research progress of brain neuroscience is still very slow. Therefore, Shen Xiangyang believes that “brain science +AI” will definitely become the most exciting direction of scientific research in the future.

“If my students say they miss the PhD, I encourage them to think in this direction, which must be the most meaningful direction for the next 30 years.” Shen Xiangyang said.

In fact, Xiaoice, Microsoft’s AI assistant, already has an “emotional” component. This “emotional” component comes from a lot of social networking data. It has been 31 months since xiaoice was born and now it has 40 million users. In the process of continuous dialogue with Xiaoice, Xiaoice is also constantly learning deeply. Shen Xiangyang believes that Xiaoice is actually learning human emotions in a data-driven way.

But, when artificial intelligence develops to have the language ability, the speech ability, the visual ability and the understanding ability, the human will begin to fear the development of artificial intelligence?

Shen xiangyang said bluntly: “I think fear is useless. In any technology wave, we are very cautious. In the case of nuclear energy, we need to regulate nuclear energy, because if you’re not careful, things can go wrong. Ai has actually raised a lot of questions, including questions of ethics and bias.”

As a result, Microsoft has set up an AI ethics committee within the company to study and discuss the issue.

The popularization of Microsoft artificial intelligence

Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.

In terms of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, Microsoft has been emphasizing the popularization of ARTIFICIAL intelligence. The concept was unveiled by Satya at the Ignite conference in 2016 and describes a blueprint for popularizing ARTIFICIAL intelligence.

Microsoft’s concept is more for developers. Microsoft has launched Microsoft Awareness services based on Microsoft Smart Cloud, which opens up 25 apis for developers to access voice, vision, natural language, or search functions. According to Shen xiangyang, Microsoft has accumulated nearly one million developers in a short time since the launch.

“We believe that only by allowing these developers to really take advantage of the latest AI technologies can we make AI widespread through them.” Shen xiangyang said.

Microsoft hopes to bring ai to more people and enjoy the technological, business and user experience improvements it brings.