Kai Yu

Timeline

1. 1994–2006

   Tsinghua and a Cambridge PhD

   He studies automation at Tsinghua University from 1994, earning a bachelor's degree in 1999 and a master's in pattern recognition and intelligent systems in 2002. At the Machine Intelligence Lab of Cambridge University's Engineering Department, he completes a PhD in speech recognition in 2006.

2. 2006–2012

   Research associate at Cambridge

   He stays at Cambridge's Engineering Department as a research associate from 2006 to 2010 and a senior research associate from 2010 to 2012. Two of his papers win best paper awards at Interspeech 2010, and another wins at the 2010 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop. In 2011, his entry is named the best spoken dialogue system (controlled test) in CMU's "Let's Go" Spoken Dialogue Challenge.

3. 2007–2008

   Co-founding AISpeech

   In 2007, he and Shixing Gao, both University of Cambridge graduates, found AISpeech in Cambridge, UK, with Gao as CEO and Yu as chief scientist. The company settles in Suzhou, China, in 2008 and develops natural language, speech recognition, speech synthesis and voiceprint technology for human-machine interaction.

4. 2012

   SpeechLab at Shanghai Jiao Tong

   He joins Shanghai Jiao Tong University as a research professor in 2012 and founds SpeechLab, which is later extended and renamed the Cross-media Language Intelligence (X-LANCE) Lab. In 2012, he is named a Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.

5. 2016–2022

   AISpeech and a national platform

   Goldman Sachs names AISpeech among the "AI Key Players" in its 2016 AI equity research report, and Gartner lists it as a Cool Vendor for AI (East Asia) in 2017. In June 2018, the company raises CN¥500 million (US$76 million) in Series D funding. In 2022, he leads the National AI Open Innovation Platform on Language Computing, granted to AISpeech by China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

6. August 2025

   An ISCA Fellowship

   In August 2025, at Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam, he is named an ISCA Fellow for contributions to speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems and real-world deployment of spoken language technology. He is the first recipient from mainland China since the award's creation in 2007.

7. 2026

   IEEE Fellow and ISCA lecturer

   IEEE elects him a Fellow in its class of 2026 for contributions to the design and application of spoken language technologies. ISCA also names him one of its 2026 Distinguished Lecturers.

8. As of October 2026

   Distinguished professor and chief scientist

   He is a distinguished professor at SJTU's School of Computer Science, director of its Machine Intelligence Institute and head of the X-LANCE Lab, and he remains co-founder and chief scientist of AISpeech. He coauthors ChemDFM, a large language foundation model for chemistry published in 2025, and a 2026 IEEE TPAMI review of discrete speech tokens. He is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Sutton and Barto's textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction.