Chinese play starring roles at Microsoft

Huang was instrumental in introducing Microsoft's Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) and speech recognition/TTS technologies to the public. From 2000 to 2004, Huang served as the general manager of Microsoft's Speech Platforms Group and shipped Microsoft Speech Server and other voice technologies used in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Windows Mobile and Microsoft Exchange Server. Microsoft Response Point received 2009's Technology of the Year Awards as the best VOIP phone system from the InfoWorld Magazine.

Huang is currently leading the company's advanced technology group, which has helped to ship Bing Torque, CNTK, Project Oxford, and Hyperlapse. The speech and dialog research group continues to advance core speech technologies used in Microsoft's products such as Microsoft Cortana and Skype Translator.

From 2009 to 2014, he served as the architect for Bing and worked on massive scale machine learning on intent understanding, mobile and ranking that enabled Bing's significantly improved search quality.

Now Huang also serves as Hunan University's honorary dean of the school of software engineering. On his LinkedIn page, he said, "I'm excited that I am now 'back' to my alumni university. Hunan University is located in my wonderful home town Changsha and her academic history is dated back to the Yuelu Academy founded over 1,030 years ago!"

CHIME

Both Hong and Ran are actively involved in the Chinese Microsoft Employee network (CHIME), the mission of which is to serve Chinese-background employees in headquarters and other countries, so they can help each other with their lives, and with career development.

Hong is currently the chairman of CHIME. Last year, Ran was elected vice-chairman.

Ran gave examples of some of CHIME's recent events, including the professional seminar between Microsoft and Chinese IT companies, Chinese cultural public lectures to help the community know more about China and the annual Asian Spring Festival Celebration, which drew thousands from the Greater Seattle region.

While Hong and the CHIME board members' fulltime jobs are as engineers at Microsoft, young Chinese are looking for a bigger role to play outside of Microsoft.

"We volunteer in the Chinese Microsoft Employee network and hope to impact the Greater Seattle region and promote better ties between China and the United States," Hong said.

"As a Chinese-American engineer at Microsoft, I feel I have the responsibility to connect with talented people and together we make impact," Ran said.

CHIME was founded in the early 1990s by a group of Chinese employees of Microsoft Corporation. Nowadays, CHIME has close to 4,000 members and is one of the largest professional Chinese communities in the US.

It has played a bigger role both inside and outside Microsoft. On CHIME's website, their recent activities include the 15th Microsoft Asian Spring Festival Celebration, a river rafting trip on the Skykomish River — the most difficult river for whitewater rafting in Washington State, a short seminar to the current Tsinghua-UNC EMBA class when they visited Microsoft Redmond campus.

Senior leaders at Microsoft in both the US and China who are passionate about the Chinese employee community, work with the CHIME board closely to facilitate CHIME activities by engaging internal or external resources.

Lu, Shum and Huang all serve as the CHIME Advisory Board.

Hong said he is excited about Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Seattle, which was announced Sept 16 by the White House. "We look forward to it definitely. It means a lot to the United States and China. It means a lot to us."