After Jennifer and Du Qiu spent an afternoon with each other yesterday, the cold feeling between the two dissipated a lot, and when she saw him walk into the box, she introduced him very casually: "Qiu, this is Dr. Huang Xuedong of Microsoft Redmond Research Institute, I met by chance in the hotel café yesterday, and I temporarily invited him to be a technical consultant for me, don't you mind?"

Sure enough, it was him......

Du Qiu had listened to Huang Xuedong's academic lectures before crossing, when he was already the world's top speech recognition technology expert, as a dual academician of IEEE and ACM two top computer associations, and the only outstanding Chinese technical engineer at Microsoft, the speech recognition system developed by his team has a word error rate of only about 6%, which is comparable to professional stenographers, and the results have been used in Bing, Cortana, Skype, Xiaoice chatbots and other intelligent voice projects familiar to ordinary netizens. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

In addition to technology, this person's social circle is also very extensive, Microsoft founded the China Research Institute in Beijing in 1998, and later upgraded to the Asian Research Institute, there have been a total of four deans, including the first Kai-Fu Lee, the third Shen Xiangyang and the fourth Hong Xiaowen and Huang Xuedong have a deep relationship, because they have all studied at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and they are all students of Turing Award winner Raj Reddy, Kai-Fu Lee and Hong Xiaowen also joined Microsoft after Huang Xuedong lobbied.

"Dr. Huang, welcome, you come to Cloud City, why don't you notify me in advance or He Lixing?" Du Qiu warmly shook hands with Huang Xuedong, and said with Ying: "When I was in Seattle last month, I wanted to visit you, but unfortunately because the work schedule was full, I couldn't make the trip, and today I finally made up for the regret at that time." ”

"If you want to say regret, it's actually my regret, Mr. Du went to Seattle, I only found out afterwards, at that time did not fulfill the friendship of the landlord, very rude. ”

Huang Xuedong used Chinese, Jennifer couldn't understand, but guessed what it meant, was a little surprised, and asked, "You know each other?"

"Mr. He, the manager of the Snapdragon operating system department, is an alumnus of Dr. Huang, and Dr. Huang and I have been in contact by email before, but we have never met in person. Du Qiu sat down opposite Jennifer and asked, "Does He Lixing know that Dr. Huang is coming to Cloud City?"

He Lixing studied at Qingcheng University for an undergraduate, and then went to Carnegie Mellon University for a master's degree, Huang Xuedong studied for a master's degree at Qingcheng University, and did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University.

"It was Xiao He who invited me here. Huang Xuedong is a native of southern Hunan and has a strong Mandarin accent, so in order to take care of Jennifer, he switched to English and said: "I went back to my hometown a few days ago to attend a friend's wedding, and I saw the news of the Internet conference in the newspaper, so I called Xiao He and listened to him introduce a lot of things about Snapdragon. ”

"So that's the case, Manager He will accompany the experts of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to dinner, and I will give him a holiday in the afternoon to catch up with you. Du Qiu's hungry chest was pressed against his back, and he raised his chopsticks to greet the two of them to eat, and said, "Jennifer, how did you meet Dr. Huang?"

"In 1992, Dr. Huang was in charge of developing a speech recognition project called Sphinx-II, which won the best in the DARPA competition, and I had seen reports about him when I was a journalist, so I recognized him when I met him in the hotel café yesterday. ”

Such a coincidence......

DARPA is the abbreviation of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and this institution has a very important place in the history of IT, because it was under its funding and management that invented world-changing technologies such as the Internet and user graphical interfaces.

Sphinx is a project started by Kai-Fu Lee during his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, and after he graduated, he was taken over by Huang Xuedong and Hong Xiaowen to develop an even better second-generation product, which still existed in 2016 and has evolved into the fourth generation, which is the world's best open-source speech recognition system.

In 2016, speech recognition is a very popular computer technology, Du Qiu has not been engaged in this research, but he is not ignorant, because speech recognition is closely related to neural networks, and neural networks are closely related to distributed computing, so he knows some skin, otherwise he would not have deliberately listened to Huang Xuedong's academic lectures, so the class got an axe and chatted with him about speech recognition technology.

"At present, speech recognition mainly uses the hidden Markov model, and the Markov model is probably like this......"

"In 1980, a computer scientist named Kunihiko Fukushima proposed a model of convolutional neural networks, and in 1998 Dr. Jan Lechuen of Bell Labs further refined the theory, which I think is useful for speech recognition......"

"Mr. Du also has research on neural networks? You are right, neural networks are very promising in speech recognition, but there are two flaws at present, resulting in poor results, one is the lack of hardware performance, the amount of computing cannot keep up, and the other is that the number of training layers of neural networks is too small, and the data that can be processed is very limited......

Both of them are technical nerds, they don't understand the amorous feelings, they chatted enthusiastically, and treated Jennifer as an ornament, she silently ate a lion's head, two small pieces of roast duck burritos, and drank half a bowl of lily pork ribs and vegetable soup, she couldn't help it, and said: "Two gentlemen, can you take care of me, don't talk about computers anymore?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't expect Mr. Du to know a lot about voice recognition, so I couldn't help but chat a little more. Huang Xuedong raised his chopsticks and said with a smile: "I won't speak anymore, concentrate on eating and being a translator." ”

"Well, Jennifer, I'll talk to you about the investment topics you care about. Du Qiu apologized, pushed the turntable on the dining table, turned the squirrel yellow croaker close to his side, and said: "This is a special dish of the hotel, it tastes good, there are few fish bones, you can taste it." ”

"Really? I'll eat a little. ”

"You have hired Dr. Huang as a consultant, so you should be very clear about the technical details and commercial implications of this morning's press conference, so I won't go into details. Du Qiu poured beer for Huang Xuedong and said: "The Internet is an information medium, although the technology is new, but the business model is old, similar to newspapers, television and movies. ”

"You said the same thing yesterday afternoon to a different person, and the content is king, right?"

"That's right, The New York Times and Time Magazine make far more money every year than paper mills and printers, Time Warner and CBS make far more money every year than projector and TV manufacturers, and for Internet companies, content manufacturers have a much bigger future than tool software manufacturers, so I think the future of Yahoo is much stronger than Netscape. ”

Jennifer, who was clumsily picking fish meat with chopsticks, stopped, looked up and asked, "What about the Snapdragon?"

"We are not a tool software manufacturer, we are a platform service provider. Du Qiu vaguely avoided this topic, and said: "The Internet has no national borders, but there are language and cultural restrictions, the most spoken language in the world is Chinese, and the most widely spoken language is English, so the most profitable content manufacturers in the future will only be produced in China and the United States, if you want to be an excellent investor, in addition to Silicon Valley, you should also explore the Chinese market as soon as possible." ”

Huang Xuedong heard the words and asked: "At present, there is no company specializing in venture capital in China, right?"

"No, but it was right away, because I was going to set up a private venture capital fund. Du Qiu raised his wine glass, and said with a half-truth smile: "If Dr. Huang is willing to return to China to start a business, he must contact me, and I am willing to help." ”

"Thank you, Mr. Du, for your kindness, but my personality is suitable for research, not for entrepreneurship. ”

"That's a shame. Du Qiu and Jennifer also touched their glasses lightly, then took a shallow sip of beer and said: "Jennifer, I have ideas, funds, and technology, and the only thing I lack now is the knowledge of investment rules, processes, and management, are you interested in helping me?"

"I've just started the venture capital industry in May, so I don't know much, so I'm afraid I won't be able to help much. Although Jennifer shirked this, she asked with great interest: "But if the investment amount is relatively small, I am willing to use private funds to cooperate with you and accumulate some experience." ”

"The cost of starting a business in China is much lower than that of the United States, and the amount of capital to be used is not much, and I have three projects in my hands, and the investment amount is not large, and the largest one is only about 500,000 US dollars, if you are interested, I can arrange for you to meet with the entrepreneurs. ”

"Can you tell us about it now?"

"The first project was founded by Snapdragon's internal employees, the main business is to build websites for government departments and large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises, we released the cloud city hotline the afternoon before yesterday, and yesterday we received dozens of consultation calls and order intentions, there are hundreds of cities and thousands of state-owned enterprises in China, this is a very low-risk, very potential project. ”

Jennifer was a little confused and asked, "Isn't this a direct conflict with Snapdragon's business?"

"I don't like dealing with government officials, especially with design and technology, because they don't understand anything and they like to point fingers. Du Qiu smiled sarcastically and explained: "Website construction is not the focus of Snapdragon's development, but this business requires a lot of manpower, and keeping it will make the company bloated and chaotic, so it is better to go independent and encourage those employees who are innovative and adventurous to develop freely." ”

"You're such a strange person. Jennifer didn't ask for the exact amount of investment, but said, "But I agree with you that doing business with the government is a hassle." What are the other two projects?"

"There is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who plans to return to China to start a business called China Online, which uses the Internet to provide Chinese business information to overseas investors. ”

"You have to pay for information, right?" Jennifer asked, with a keen business acumen, "this kind of business that Dow Jones, Bloomberg and Reuters are all doing, what is his advantage?"

"His academic qualifications are an advantage, and returnees are very sought-after in China, especially at prestigious universities like MIT. Du Qiu briefly introduced Zhang Chaoyang's resume, saying: "Last month, he accompanied the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to China and was received by Vice Premier Zhu, which is very useful in China, allowing him to enter the circle of the top of society and obtain information that news agencies like Dow Jones and Bloomberg have no access to." ”

Jennifer looked at Huang Xuedong and saw that he nodded to indicate that this was indeed the case, so she said, "Okay, this is a good project, what about another one?"

"There is also an e-commerce website for small and medium-sized enterprises, but the partner I have chosen has not yet decided whether to do it or not, and I will talk about it later. ”

"Autumn, you're so unreliable!"