Dong Yu

Dong Yu(俞栋) is a Chinese-American computer scientist, AI researcher, and engineer, known for his research in speech recognition, deep learning, and multi-modal artificial intelligence. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). Yu currently serves as Distinguished Scientist and Vice General Manager at Tencent AI Lab and Chief Scientist and Vice General Manager at Tencent Cloud AI.

Early life and education Yu received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University and a master's degree in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Control from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Career Yu began his professional career at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, in 1998, where he worked in the Speech and Dialog Research Group. During his time at Microsoft, he led research on automatic speech recognition, multi-modal AI, and deep learning framework, contributing to products such as Microsoft Cortana, Skype Translator, and Ford Sync.

In 2017, Yu joined Tencent America, where he holds dual leadership roles at Tencent AI Lab and Tencent Cloud AI. His work focuses on developing large language models, multi-modal AI systems, and research toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). He has led teams that created systems for conversational AI, speech and music synthesis, multi-modal interaction, and intelligent web agents. In addition, he has contributed as an Associate Editor and Senior Area Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and has acted as Guest Editor for multiple IEEE journals and conference special issues focused on deep learning, speech processing, and conversational AI.

He was also an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University, holds approximately 60 patents, and was among the founders and core contributors to CNTK, an open-source deep learning framework.

He has also advanced recurrent and convolutional neural networks, end-to-end deep learning architectures, multi-modal AI, and speech synthesis, contributing to technologies that underpin modern virtual assistants and human-computer interaction systems.

More recently, his research has focused on multi-modal large language models and AGI, resulting in models such as SongGeneration, AlphaLLM, LiteSearch, WebVoyager, Cognitive Kernel, R-Zero, and WebEvolver, as well as audio front-end and speech synthesis systems used in Tencent products.