Why Tencent’s Yu Dong Became a 2022 ACM Fellow: Pioneering Deep Learning in Speech

ACM Fellows 2022 Announcement

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the selection of 57 new ACM Fellows for 2022.

Yu Dong’s Recognition

Among them, Tencent scientist Yu Dong was honored for his outstanding contributions to speech processing and the application of deep learning.

ACM, founded in 1947, created the ACM Fellow program in 1993 to recognize scientists with at least five years of experience who have made distinguished contributions. Over 1,000 ACM Fellows have been elected, and the 2022 cohort includes experts in network security, human‑computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommendation systems.

Professional Background

Yu Dong is an ACM/IEEE/ISCA Fellow and currently serves as Deputy Director of Tencent AI Lab. He is a pioneer in applying deep‑learning techniques to automatic speech recognition and is one of the early developers of the open‑source CNTK toolkit.

He holds more than 100 patents and has received numerous awards, including IEEE Signal Processing Society best‑paper awards (2013, 2016, 2020, 2022), the 2021 NAACL best long paper award, and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine best paper and column awards. His work has been cited over 50,000 times, and his h‑index exceeds 80.

His theories and models are widely deployed in industry‑grade speech recognition and processing systems.

Education: B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Automation from Zhejiang University (Zhejiang University College), M.S. in Pattern Recognition & Intelligent Control from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, M.S. in Computer Science from Indiana University, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Idaho.

Career: Joined Microsoft in 1998, moved to Microsoft Research Speech and Dialog Group in 2002 where he served as Chief Researcher and held adjunct professor positions at Zhejiang University and University of Science and Technology of China. In March 2017, he joined Tencent AI Lab as Deputy Director and established the Seattle AI Lab.

Impact on Tencent

Following the earlier election of Tencent chief scientist Zhang Zhengyou, Yu Dong’s selection makes Tencent the first company with two ACM Fellows.

Zhang Zhengyou noted that Yu Dong’s 2009 work with Geoff Hinton and Deng Li was the first successful application of deep learning to large‑vocabulary continuous speech recognition, dramatically improving accuracy. Since joining Tencent, Yu Dong has led teams that expanded into natural language processing, computer vision, and virtual digital humans, driving advances in human‑computer interaction across products such as in‑car systems, smart home devices, intelligent customer service, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Video, game commentary, game production, and advertising.