Background
Huang grew up in Hunan, China and became a US citizen in 1995.
Career
Education
In 1978, Huang entered Hunan University without finishing high school. He graduated with a B.S. degree in computer science from Hunan University in 1982, and went on to earn a MS in computer science from Tsinghua University. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Edinburgh.
Academic research
He joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty in 1989 and worked with Raj Reddy and Kai-Fu Lee on speech recognition. At CMU, Huang received the 1992 Alan Newell research excellence medal for the Sphinx-II system that had the most accurate performance.
Huang has co-authored two books: and . He became an IEEE Fellow in 2000. Huang received the National Education Commission of China's 1987 Science and Technology Progress Award, IEEE 1993 Speech Processing Best Paper Award. SpeechTek has named him a top 10 leader of the speech industry.
Apple Computer recruited Lee in 1991 and Microsoft recruited Huang in 1993 to start the competitive speech efforts respectively after two's collaboration at Carnegie Mellon University.
Microsoft
Huang is known as Mr Speech at Microsoft for founding its speech recognition initiatives. Huang is currently general manager of the Communications Innovation Center at Microsoft. He is responsible to bring to market new communications products and services such as Response Point, an advanced phone system for small business.
Huang has spent his career helping to advance speech recognition technologies in a variety of capacities. He was the key leader who brought Microsoft's Speech Application Programming Interface and speech recognition/TTS technologies to the public. From 2000 to 2004, Huang served as general manager of Microsoft's Speech Platforms Group, where he led both the business and engineering teams that shipped Microsoft Speech Server and other voice technologies in Windows, Office, Windows Mobile and Exchange.
Huang helped to recruit Kai-Fu Lee to Microsoft from Apple Computer in 1998 to run its Beijing labs. Lee later came back to the USA and became Huang's boss before Lee switched to Google.
Hunan University and University of Washington
In addition to his responsbilities at Microsoft, Huang is currently of School of Software Engineering at Hunan University helping to modernize China's software engineering education. He also serves as an affiliate Professor and is a member of the Industrial Advisory Board of EE at University of Washington.
TV and Books
*''Do You Speak American?'' By Robert MacNeil, William Cran, Robert McCrum , Harcourt Trade
*
*''Spoken Language Processing: a guide to theory, algorithm, and system development'' by Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, Hsiao-Wuen Hon Prentice Hall
*''Hidden Markov Models for Speech Recognition'' by Xuedong D Huang, Yasuo Ariki, Mervyn A Jack Edinburgh University Press
