【校友风采】创造商业未来的天才--黄学东（湖南大学计算机78级）

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25 GENIUSES WHO ARE CREATING THE FUTURE OFBUSINESS
创造了商业未来的25名天才
SOON, SOFTWARE WILL know how you feel—and will use that data to sell youthings. The gig economy will go global (but it’s not Uber-take-all). The techindustry will finally be inclusive. AI will achieve something like commonsense, and it will be open source too. But that future won’t build itself.Actual people (at least for now) have to make these things happen, and theyaren’t the C-suite hotshots you always hear about. The 25 people in these pagesare the unsung creative, technical, and social visionaries working to bring theincredible world of tomorrow to you today. Get to know them now. Welcome to oursecond annual Next List.
再过不久，软件将会知道你的感觉——并且利用这些数据将东西卖给你。“共享经济”将成为全球化趋势（但并不是“优步大满贯”的这种现象）。科技产业最终将无所不包。在以后，人工智能能够识别大多数的感觉，而且也会飞入寻常百姓家，变成公开的资源。但未来仍然需要我们共同努力。（至少是现在）必须有人亲手去实现这些梦想，而且这些人并不是我们耳熟能详的顶级精英。
本文列举出的25个人是一些默默无名的有创造力、有专业技术并拥有社会远见的人，正是他们将美好的明天带到了我们面前。今天我们介绍的其中一人，他是湖南大学计算机78级校友黄学东，湖南大学客座教授，湖南大学软件学院名誉院长。

Xuedong Huang
Chief Speech Scientist— Microsoft
黄学东   微软首席语言系统专家
Voice is the next interface
声音是下一个交界面
Skype Translator, which converts spoken language in real time, and Microsoft’svoice assistant, Cortana, are both the fruit of Xuedong Huang’s efforts. Hefounded Microsoft’s speech recognition team in 1993, but it’s only recently,with advances in machine learning, that the technology has finally left therealm of science fiction. Now Huang is behind a push to make the deep learningthat powers these tools available to everyone.
Skype翻译器可以实时转换语音用户所说的语言，Cortana则是微软的语音助手，这两大产品都是黄学东的精彩之作。他在1993年就组建了微软语言识别团队，但是随着近期机器学习能力的发展，这项技术才得以脱离科幻领域，投入到实际生活中来。目前黄学东正在想方设法对这些工具进行深度研究，从而使它们能够为所有人所用。
Last year Microsoft launched Project Oxford, a set of machine-learning toolsthat enable developers to create their own programs. One, for example, canrecognize a person and verify their identity based on their voice. Another is atool for turning written text into audio. “Oxford is trying to democratize AI,” Huangsays.
去年，微软公司启动了Oxford项目，这组机器学习工具可以使开发者创造属于自己的程序。例如，其中一个程序可以根据人的声音对其身份加以辨认识别。而另一个工具则可以将文字转换为音频。黄学东表示：“Oxford项目是为了实现人工智能的大众化。”

This sets it apart from other efforts like Google’s open source TensorFlowplatform, which only makes artificial intelligence available to researchers andprogrammers. More than 3,000 developers have used the Oxford tools so far. Meanwhile, the techcontinues to improve. When Huang joined Microsoft, he says, “I never thought acomputer would be as accurate as a human.” But he estimates that within two tothree years, computers will be as good as people at transcribing telephoneconversations. We know a lot of journalists who can hardly wait. —Jessi Hempel
正是这一点将其与谷歌的开放性资源平台Tensor Flow有所区别，后者所开发的人工智能工具只向研究者和程序员开放。而目前为止，已经有3,000余名开发者使用Oxford工具。同时，这项技术在持续改善。黄学东说，在他最初加入微软时，“从没有想过电脑会像人一样精确”。但是，他估计在两至三年内，电脑在电话会话音译中的作用将达到人类的水平。我们知道很多记者已经迫不及待等待这天的到来了。
——Jessi Hempel

原文转自：http://www.wired.com/2016/04/wired-nextlist-2016

本期团队责任编辑：洁西  紫阳   贾萍