PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Furu Wei

Also known as Wei Furu

As of October 2026, Furu Wei is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Microsoft Research, Chief Scientist of Microsoft Research Asia, and leader of its General AI group and MSRA Singapore Lab. He studied computer science at Wuhan University, worked at IBM Research China, and joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2010. His work includes R-NET for reading comprehension, UniLM for language understanding and generation, LayoutLMv2 for document understanding, and WavLM for speech. He was named to MIT Technology Review’s 2017 Innovators Under 35 China list, and his coauthored XiaoIce Band received KDD’s 2018 Best Student Paper Award.

Timeline

  1. 2004–2009

    Training in computer science

    He earned a B.Sc. in computer science in 2004 and a Ph.D. in the same field in June 2009 from Wuhan University.

  2. July 2009–November 2010

    Moving from IBM to MSRA

    In July 2009, he joined IBM Research China as a staff researcher. He moved to MSRA’s Natural Language Computing group in November 2010.

  3. 2017

    An innovation honor

    MIT Technology Review named him to its 2017 Innovators Under 35 China list for contributions to natural language processing.

  4. 2018

    Reading with R-NET

    At Microsoft Research Asia, Wei led research on R-NET, whose SQuAD text-comprehension result surpassed human performance. He coauthored XiaoIce Band, which received KDD’s 2018 Best Student Paper Award.

  5. 2019–2021

    Language and document models

    In 2019, he coauthored UniLM, a shared Transformer pretrained for language understanding and generation. By 2021, he coauthored LayoutLMv2, which models text, layout, and image together for document understanding.

  6. 2021

    Pretraining for speech

    He coauthored WavLM, a large-scale self-supervised model for full-stack speech processing.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading two research groups

    He is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Microsoft Research, serves as Chief Scientist of Microsoft Research Asia, and leads its General AI group and MSRA Singapore Lab.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Furu Wei yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. 简介/Short Bio | zero, one, and more manyones.wordpress.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. 2018年“二十一世纪的计算”学术研讨会暨微软教育峰会 - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Furu Wei | Innovators Under 35 innovatorsunder35.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. SIGKDD Awards: 2018 SIGKDD Best Paper Award Winners kdd.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Furu Wei’s Homepage thegenerality.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Furu Wei at Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 14 October 2026.