Past Event
Seminar

“AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” Belfer Center Seminar with Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

RSVP Required Harvard Faculty, Fellows, Staff, and Students

The Belfer Center will host a seminar with Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, founding President of Google China and Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, on his new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. The discussion will be moderated by Lawrence Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University and will be held on Wednesday, May 1, 2019 from 5:30-6:30pm in the Belfer Center Library. Refreshments will be provided.

The two leaders in Artificial Intelligence, China and the United States, have opposing attitudes toward the development, implementation, and marketing of this technology. The U.S maintains a competitive edge, but China has outlined a compelling strategy to achieve global AI leadership by 2030. In pursuit of AI dominance, both countries will have to answer tough questions about its implications for global income inequality, job displacement, data surveillance, loss of privacy, and other challenges. Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has lived and worked in both China and the U.S. and will offer perspectives on the competition for AI as well as the outlook for the Chinese economy and broader US-China economic relations.

Kai Fu Lee Book

Speaker Bio

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a $2B dual currency investment fund focused on Chinese high-tech companies. He also serves as President of the Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute. Prior to founding Sinovation Ventures, Dr. Lee was the founding President of Google China. He previously held positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple.

Dr. Lee is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), where he was Vice Chairman, and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Dr. Lee founded Microsoft Research China, named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review, which has trained many AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei and Haier.

Dr. Lee holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where as his thesis he developed the world's first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system. Dr. Lee also holds Honorary Doctorate Degrees from the City University of Hong Kong and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Lee has also authored 10 US patents, and more than 100 journal and conference papers.