In November 2019, Daniel Povey, the father of the speech recognition open source tool Kaldi, joined the Xiaomi speech recognition team. For a time, there was an international uproar. More people couldn't understand. The United States is not staying here, so why should it fall into the arms of China?
Who is he? Is it awesome?
His name may not be familiar to you, but do you know Apple ’s Siri, Alibaba’s Tmall Elf , and Xiaomi’s Xiao Ai Classmate ?
These voice applications all use tools developed by Daniel! He is not only a recognized expert, but also a big shot that various brands compete for.
Why does Daniel with such skills fall in love with China?
Daniel was born in London, England. He completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. In 2003, he received his PhD in speech recognition.
's desire for knowledge made him more and more certain of his life dream, which is to develop artificial intelligence and talk to machines. After graduating from
, he joined IBM Research, where his main focus was on speech recognition. Because
was very consistent with his dream, he was very passionate about his work and became a member of IBM's senior research team in just one year.
In 2008, Microsoft offered him an olive branch. In order to pursue higher goals, he joined Microsoft and developed the famous Kaldi speech recognition system. The development of the
system can be said to have earned Microsoft a lot of money and attention. He himself also received a lot of salary, and his reputation is rising.
However, there were various entangled interests within the company, which made it impossible for him to conduct research with peace of mind.
So, he resolutely resigned from his job at Microsoft. He went to teach at Johns Hopkins University because he thought the atmosphere at the university was suitable for research.
He teaches and conducts research at the same time. By 2019, his papers had been cited more than 20,000 times, which shows his strength.
But the reality is not always so satisfying.
In 2019, the Floyd incident triggered the black movement in the United States. Demonstrations, random smashing of shops, and frequent burning and looting incidents soon spread to campuses.
There have been many incidents of vicious injuries at Johns Hopkins University.
In desperation, the school set up a temporary police station, but this not only failed to stop the vicious incident, but also aroused fierce opposition from some students, who believed it was racial discrimination.
even got into conflict with the school. Protesting students occupied the school's administration building, and coincidentally, the CLSP (Center for Speech and Language Processing) computer room that Daniel was responsible for maintaining was also in this building.
Daniel was worried that his server would be compromised, so he reported the situation to the school, but the school was indifferent.
He had no choice but to hold up a sign and call on the students to calm down, but the crazy students didn't care and continued to go their own way.
Daniel couldn't bear the destruction of his server, so he led his students to break into the computer room in an attempt to take back the server.
When this happened, he inevitably had physical conflicts with the protesting students, and was also insulted and accused by the students, saying that he was a racist.
Daniel, who was accused, was fired by the school for "endangering student safety."
Daniel was completely disheartened by the school's actions. In the face of politics, everything was nonsense.
When major companies heard that Daniel was fired, they all started thinking about hiring Daniel.
At that time, among many companies, the famous Facebook was included.
But after they learned the reason for Daniel's dismissal, they suddenly lost their enthusiasm for Daniel. The email replied by
was full of contempt, and he also said that he would try it out for 6 weeks before deciding whether to hire him.
Such an arrogant attitude completely angered Daniel. He publicly stated, "I don't care about Facebook."
His many job hunting experiences made him completely lose hope in American companies.
When Xiaomi's Lei Jun came to the United States and invited him to join Xiaomi and agreed to all the conditions, Daniel agreed without hesitation and said, "I don't need a high annual salary."
On August 31, 2021, when Daniel officially launched the new generation of Kaldi as the chief voice scientist of Xiaomi Group , it gave Xiaomi a head start in market competition.
When someone asked Daniel why he chose Xiaomi, he said: "I agree with China's working environment and appreciate Xiaomi's emphasis on independent research and development."
It’s not just Daniel. China’s increasingly open environment and increasingly complete talent system are attracting more foreign talents to China.
For example, the Japanese scientist "Father of Photocatalysis" Fujishima Akira brought his entire team to University of Shanghai for Science and Technology.
In 2018, American computer expert Mario Szeged, winner of the Gödel Prize, the highest award for theoretical computing, joined China's Alibaba Damo Academy.
We believe that as China develops faster and faster, not only talents who have gone abroad are returning, but top scientists from other countries are also beginning to pour into China. An inclusive and open China will be a better and better choice for talents.
are you right?
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