De Kai Wu

Dr. De Kai is an American professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and a Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. He is among only 17 scientists named Founding Fellow by the Association for Computational Linguistics, for his pioneering contributions to machine learning foundations of machine translation that led to the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc translators. De Kai was recruited as founding faculty of the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong directly from UC Berkeley, where his Ph.D. thesis was one of the first to argue for the paradigm shift toward machine learning-based natural language processing.

He holds a Kellogg-HKUST Executive MBA and a BS in Computer Engineering (Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude, Revelle College honors) from UCSD. For his work on AI, machine learning, machine translation, natural language processing, music technology, computational creativity, Debrett's HK 100 recognized De Kai as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong. For his work on AI ethics and society, De Kai was one of eight inaugural members selected by Google in 2019 for its AI ethics council. He can be found at @dekai123 and http://dek.ai