To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
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.