Father of Kaldi, Cambridge High School Student
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public number “Qombit” (ID: QbitAI), author Gan Ming, Li Gen.
The global AI voice big cow, now turned to millet – only the official official announcement.
Daniel Povey (Dan), British, Ph.D., Cambridge University, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, the god of AI voice.
The speech recognition open source toolkit Kaldi, which integrates various models for speech recognition, is an important foundation in the field of speech recognition.
Before Facebook invited to join, it is said to directly open a million dollar contract.
△Via 褚明宇:Dan in Shanghai
But because of the unsatisfactory American political correctness and the left-handed behavior, the confrontation was first dismissed by the university, and Facebook later hoped to review it separately…
So Professor Dan angered Facebook and publicly stated that he would switch to a Chinese company and work in China. Now, two months later, Professor Dan actually said it.
Millet will be his next stop.
Why is it millet?
Professor Dan first disclosed the progress on Twitter, but it is not officially official.
He said that he will sign a contract with Xiaomi, officially enter the company at the end of this year, and then build a team.
The Xiaomi official has not responded to this.
But the qubits were heard, and Xiaomi’s “job hunting” from Dan’s appearance began to show his enthusiasm, and now the offer has been fixed.
Dean Professor seems to be very satisfied with Xiaomi.
But after many excavations, we also learned that Xiaomi is not the only Chinese company that Professor Dan has met with.
To synthesize the channel information of all parties, we simply restore the westward travel of Dan:
This August, due toUnable to pass the students’ left-wing farce and can’t stand Facebook’s behavior, Professor Dan publicly announced his switch to a more pragmatic Chinese university\company.
At the same time, a headhunting company called Huashi Xianda Huntsor became Dan’s service provider.
Since September, Dan came to China and met in colleges and universities.
Beyond Beijing, Dan also went to Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou.
Big V褚 Mingyu also banqueted Dan’s Weibo and said that Dan’s arrival is “a fortunate in the field of artificial intelligence in China! He is the most talented and cutest genius I have ever seen in my life. The real science madman who has never met in the year.”
It is certain that in colleges and universities, Dan has exchanges with Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Company, Beijing-based Sogou, Didi, Express and Meituan have all reported Dan’s news. Suzhou’s AI voice Unicorn Si Bi Chi also heard that he intends to take Dan into his knees.
Tencent and Ali also joined the competition.
But the gossip said that Dan had a meeting with Ali Tencent earlier and started in the United States. Tencent has been at the AI Lab in Seattle.After contact, a P11 god from Ali also came out to dig.
But in the end, Xiaomi won this big cattle talent battle.
Why?
Quantum detects two major reasons:
One is Xiaomi’s ambition and strategy in terms of voice. Domestic is no stranger, Xiaomi’s Xiaoai classmates are one of the fastest intelligent voice systems, and the voice-centric AIOT strategy is also recognized by Xiaomi as one of the dual engines with the same status as the mobile phone business.
On the other hand, it is an open source development posture. Dan is the father of Kaldi, and he always cares about open source. In recent years, Xiaomi has also strengthened its efforts in open source. Open source learning framework and other open source is the industry’s reputation, and it is also an important contributor to Kaldi.
However, Xiaomi won the “heart” of Dan, and it is also inseparable from the gesture of Xiaomi.
I heard that Dan came to visit, Cui Baoqiu, vice president of Xiaomi Group and chairman of the technical committee, personally, and Cui Baoqiu himself is also an advocate of open source ecology, and he is very happy with Dan.
So next time Professor Dan announced to join Xiaomi, I am afraid it is only a matter of time.
And Dan came to China and joined Xiaomi. It is not only as simple as the big cow’s job hunting. From the perspective of Dan’s entire experience, it is also a mirror image of the US’s “political correctness.”
No one can think of it, an AI voice big cow will be so angry and wronged because of “saving the server from the students”…
There is no way to study and work normally in the United States.
Excluded by students, expelled by JHU
Dan’s last job was an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins University Language and Speech Processing Center (CLSP), which lasted for seven years.
The years are quiet, with team members doing research and maintaining Kaldi.
To April of this year, a calm life was broken.
The students at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) set off a protest in order to boycott the establishment of a police station in the school.
One of the objects they focused on was a school in the school called Garland.Hall’s building – the doors and windows are closed, sitting in front of the building, no one is allowed to enter.
However, the server where CLSP stores core data is in this building, and there are problems that require on-site maintenance, otherwise the consequences are unimaginable.
Obviously, the “top” students will not allow Dan to enter the building.
As the server is getting worse, Dan is more anxious. As a developer, the server is his restricted area.
Soon, he couldn’t stand this situation anymore. On the night of May 7th, Dan took the “broken bolt” and took a group of people, trying to break through the “defense line” against the students with practical action.
The result was not optimistic. He failed and was smashed out of the building by the students.
And some of the people he brought also had physical conflicts with the students, and he was allegedly punched in the melee.
Although they have suffered more serious attacks, this punch has also laid the groundwork for follow-up incidents because they are the “leisure people” in the society.
The latter processing makes many people feel inexplicable.
In the building at the time, it was basically black, and Dan was accused by students and related organizations of being “racist”.
The school was also under pressure to expel him directly on the grounds of “endangering student safety” and gave a deadline of August 31.
Furiously refusing Facebook and switching to China
Dan is very angry and expresses strong dissatisfaction in the blog. In his view, this is a double standard, and the school is heavily biased towards students.
After the incident, Facebook immediately threw an olive branch to him, hoping that he would lead the team to develop a voice assistant similar to Alexa.
Dan, who was unfairly treated by JHU, readily agreed, and announced this move in his blog: he will join Seattle’s Facebook on August 19, instead of leaving the school at the end of the month.
But soon, Dan felt that something was wrong.
According to the information Dan revealed in the blog post, Facebook is at 8On the 15th of the month, he sent an email to him that he might not be able to join Facebook and become a regular employee.
Although Offer has not been revoked, Facebook will conduct an independent investigation into the incident in which he was expelled from JHU, and finally whether to give a full-time Offer, but also the results of the investigation.
The survey is expected to last for six weeks, during which time Dan will work for Facebook as a “contractor.”
In Dan’s opinion, this gave him a feeling of deja vu, and he refused Facebook.
And said that it will be transferred to China – to a company or a college.
In an interview with BaltimoreSun, Dan further disclosed the details.
He said it is easier to get along with the Chinese because there is no American-style “political correctness”, and there are many such institutions (Chinese companies) in Seattle, and they don’t even need to consider moving.
After the disclosure of this news, it immediately sparked a wide-ranging discussion. Everyone speculated that it would be a company that could “get this baby.”
The highest voice is Tencent because it has a lab in Seattle. However, there are also laboratories such as Baidu and Fast Hand.
But in the end, Xiaomi was spent, and the startup’s love of wisdom also announced that Dan would serve as a consultant.
Speech recognition big cow “Daniel Povey”
Finally, let’s get to know the legend.
Daniel Povey is an Englishman and graduated from Cambridge University in 2003.
After joining IBM (2003-2008) and Microsoft (2008-2012), research computer speech recognition technology.
In 2012, he chose academics. Entered Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor.
In recent years, he has also published a lot of research results and gained a lot of influence. According to the data on Google Scholar, his published papers have been cited more than 20,000 times.
One of his most famous achievements is the open source speech recognition toolkit Kaldi in 2011, which integrates various models for speech recognition, which can be said to be the basis of speech recognition.
At present, this project has been marked 7000+ on GitHub, and the research on related papers has exceeded 3000+.
This project was born at a seminar at Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Perhaps it was because of this academic exchange that Dan chose this place.
But seven years later, the academic discussion was another situation.
Because of academic research, it was embarrassing to be expelled from “political correctness”.
What do you say?
Reference link:
https://www.zhihu.com/question/339481009/answer/781219312
http://www.danielpovey.com/leaving.html
https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-johns-hopkins-professor-facebook-20190818-hb5ytjlmf5h7xa452jd7bkihce-story.html