Dr. Li Deng was elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering of Canada and of Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2019. Since May 2017, He has been the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Citadel. Prior to Citadel, he was the Chief Scientist of AI, Founder of Deep Learning Technology Center, and Partner Research Manager at Microsoft for over 17 years (2000-2017). Prior to Microsoft, he was an Assistant Professor, Tenured Associate and Full Professor (1989-99) at University of Waterloo, Canada, as well as holding teaching/research positions at MIT (Cambridge, 1992-93), ATR (Kyoto, Japan, 1997-98), and HKUST (Hong Kong, 1995). He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2004), Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (1993), & Fellow of the ISCA (2011). Since 2000, Dr. Deng has also been an Affiliate Professor at University of Washington, Seattle.

Dr. Deng was elected to the Board of Governors of IEEE Signal Processing Society, and was Editors-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine & IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, & Language Processing (2008-2014), for which he was honored with the IEEE SPS Meritorious Service Award. In recognition of his pioneering AI research on disrupting speech recognition using large-scale deep learning, he received the 2015 IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Automatic Speech Recognition & Deep Learning”. Dr. Deng was also awarded numerous best paper and patent awards for contributions to AI, machine learning, information retrieval, multimedia signal processing, speech processing/recognition, and human language technology. He is the author/co-author of 6 technical books in several areas of his expertise.