Kai Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong Univerisity
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Kai Yu

Ph.D. (Cantab) FISCA FIEEE

Distinguished Professor
Head of the Cross-media Language Intelligence (X-LANCE) Lab (Former SpeechLab)
Director of the Machine Intelligence Institute

School of Computer Science
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Email: kai.yu [AT] sjtu [DOT] edu [DOT] cn
Address: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200240, China

[中文]|[English]

Biography

I am currently a distinguished professor and the director of Machine Intelligence Institute of the School of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), as well as the co-founder and chief scientist of AISpeech. I am a fellow of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), fellow of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and distinguished member of CCF (China Computer Federation).

My academic journey began at the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, where I completed my bachelor and master degrees in 1999 and 2002 respectively. I obtained my PhD at the Machine Intelligence Lab of the Engineering Department, Cambridge University, U.K. in 2006 and then worked as a senior research associate there. I joined SJTU in 2012 and founded SpeechLab at SJTU. Later, SpeechLab was extended and renamed as Cross-media Language Intelligence (X-LANCE) Lab as it is now. I have served as a member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2017-2019), a board member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Conferences Board (2024-2025), as well as an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2019-2024). I am currently a board member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Membership Board. I am also a coucil member of the CCF (China Computer Federation) and serve as the director of the Speech, Dialogue and Auditory Processing Technical Committee of CCF.

My research interests primarily lie in the field of conversational AI, including rich aspects of speech and language processing as well as multi-modal linguistic computing. The goal of my research is to build cognitive conversational agent which can operate in complex real-world environment, deal with uncertainty, deliver information in a humanized way and evolve via interacting with environment. I have published over 300 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and won numerous paper awards. I used to serve as program chairs for Interspeech, ICMI and SigDial, general chair for National Conference on Man-machine Communication (the largest domestic speech conference in China), as well as area chairs of speech processing or dialogue systems for Interspeech, ACL, EMNLP etc.

The outcome of my research have been both recognized in academia and successfully industrialized. I founded AISpeech to commercialize state-of-the-art speech and language processing technology. AISpeech has been selected into the “AI Key Players” list in the Equity Research Report of AI by Goldman Sachs in 2016 and one of the Cool Vendors for AI (East Asia) by Gartner in 2017. On behalf of AISpeech, I am also leading the National AI Open Innovation Platform on Language Computing, granted by Ministry of Science and Technology of China in 2022.

SJTU X-LANCE Lab

     We are looking for self-motivated Ph.D./master/undergraduate students and postdocs interested in speech and language processing. Please send your CV to me if you want to join us.

Research Interests

Selected Publications [Google Scholar][More Papers]

Review and Perspective

Speech and Audio Processing

Natural Language Processing and Conversational Agent

Multi-modal LLM and Interaction

Professional Qualification and Service

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

China Computer Federation (CCF)

Chinese Information Processing Society of China (CIPSC)

Industry Service

Other Service

Academic Conference Service

Reviewer Service

Award

Best Paper Award

National and Provincial Award and Honor

Professional Society Academic Award and Honor

Other Award and Honor


Last updated on 2026-05-15.