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Rejecting American Political Correctness, He Left in Anger and Chose to Come to China

6 years ago
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Daniel Povey
Kaldi
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Dao Wei
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Daniel Povey, a master in the field of speech recognition, was previously involved in a controversy caused by a JHU student protest and was fired by JHU. In the early morning of October 17 local time, he tweeted that he would join Xiaomi at the end of 2019, which caused a wave of discussion in the industry.

At 3 a.m. local time on October 17, the open source speech recognition toolkit Daniel Povey, the father of Kaldi, published a tweet revealing thatWill sign a contract with Xiaomi soon and officially join the company at the end of this year, and will build a team to develop the next generation "PyTorch-y Kaldi".

In the Twitter comments section, many students expressed their welcome, and some even started to recommend themselves.

Come to China! Reject American political correctness

This year has been an eventful one for Daniel Povey.

In April, students at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) launched a protest against the establishment of a police station on campus.ProtestsIn order to maintain the server of the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) in this building, Daniel Povey brought "wire cutters" to try to break through the students' "blockade" on May 7, but failed.

Daniel Povey at the protest

He was later accused of being a "racist" by students and related organizations.The school notified him of his dismissal in early August and gave him a deadline of August 31..

Daniel Povey, who was originally preparing to start working at Facebook's Seattle office on August 19, unexpectedly received a job offer on August 15, which stated that Facebook's full-time employment letter was contingent on the results of an "investigation into what happened," which would last six weeks.

Daniel Povey quickly rejected the job offer, saying, "This whole thing feels familiar." He seemed to feel that Facebook and JHU had similar attitudes.Go to work in a Chinese company or university, he said, "I feel it is easier to get along with the Chinese because they don't have the American-style 'political correctness'."

Since then, his future has become a hot topic in the industry. He posted on his personal homepage that he plans to join a Chinese company or university.

So everyone speculated that he might join a company that has a laboratory in Seattle and conducts research on speech recognition-related technologies, such as Baidu, Tencent, Kuaishou, etc.

And today, he gave the answer on Twitter.Xiaomi Beijing HeadquartersIn response, many netizens welcomed the announcement and expressed their hope to see the English version of Xiao Ai Voice Assistant.

Daniel Povey's tweets are full of welcome and expectation comments.

Do research! Only care about code, not politics

Why is Daniel Povey known as a legend in the field of speech recognition? What kind of person is he? Let's first take a look at his resume and achievements.

This legendary figure graduated from Cambridge University and worked for IBM and Microsoft

Daniel Povey received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2003, and subsequently joined IBM (2003-2008) and Microsoft (2008-2012) to research computer speech recognition technology.

As a leader in speech recognition research, he is known for his contributions to speech recognition and language processing technology. He and other researchers 2009At a seminar at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)Kaldi was first created The open source speech recognition toolkit supports linear transformation, MMI, enhanced MMI and MCE discriminant training, feature space discriminant training, and deep neural networks. It has been widely used by speech recognition researchers and developers.

According to Google Scholar, his papers have been cited more than 20,000 times.

This year's JHU student protests sparked a discussion about him.

One of Daniel Povey's doctoral students commented on his character:Workaholic,purely,enthusiasticanduprightHe would reply to emails efficiently every day and answer all the questions from students. During work hours, he would either reply to emails or write code. When he video chatted with his daughter, it would end quickly, and then he would continue to write code like crazy.

During this protest, he alsoAll I care about is CLSP's servers and data., and does not care about the political ideas behind the protesters.

Many people felt sorry for him when he was fired from JHU, which shows what kind of person he is.

In October 2013, Xiaomi discoveredHugo Barra, former Google global vice president and vice president of Android products, served as Vice President of Xiaomi International, becoming the first foreign Vice President of Xiaomi.

When Hugo was Xiaomi's vice president of international business, he was in charge of international business and the Indian market was the focus at that time.
Hugo also achieved good results

Three and a half years after joining Xiaomi, Hugo published an open letter stating that he had decided to leave Xiaomi and return to Silicon Valley due to health reasons. 

As the second foreign expert recruited by Xiaomi, we hope Daniel Povey will have smooth work in the future and make more achievements in the field of speech recognition.


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