Kai-Fu Lee *

Bio: Kai-Fu joined Google in 2005 to develop the company's operations in China, and now he heads the Greater China operation as its President. From 1998 to 2005, Kai-Fu was at Microsoft as a corporate vice president responsible for advanced natural language and user interface technologies. He also founded Microsoft Research Asia, which has since become one of the best research centers in the world. From 1996 to 1998, Kai-Fu was president of Cosmo Software, a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). There he was responsible for several product lines and the company's web strategy. Before joining SGI, Lee spent 6 years at Apple Computer, most recently as vice president of the company's interactive media group, which developed QuickTime, QuickDraw 3D, QuickTime VR and PlainTalk speech technologies. In addition, from 1988 to 1990 Kai-Fu was assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed the world's first speaker-independent continuous speech-recognition system. This system was selected as the "Most Important Innovation of 1988" by BusinessWeek. While at Carnegie Mellon, Kai-Fu also developed the computer program that plays the game "Othello," which defeated the human world champion in 1988. Kai-Fu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science with highest honors from Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.