DE KAI

Pioneering AI Scientist & ACL Founding Fellow

De Kai is widely acknowledged as a Godfather of AI. Rules based AI was the reign
during De Kai’s PhD. He argued successfully for machine learning to be introduced into
the field, changing the landscape to support AI as we know it today.


De Kai’s primary contribution to the field of AI was developing and executing the world’s
first global-scale web translator which just a few years later spawned products we know
ubiquitously around the world today as Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, etcetera.
For these contributions De Kai is one of only 17 people globally to be named as an ACL
Founding Fellow — the equivalent of a Nobel or Field’s Medal in Natural Language
Processing.


For the past decade, De Kai has turned his focus to AI Ethics. In 2019 he was named
as one of 8 founding members of Google’s AI Ethics board. Today he advises actively
on EU AI legislation via leading AI non-profit, The Future Society, alongside maintaining
his dual research/teaching post at HKUST & Berkeley University.


De Kai speaks globally on AI Ethics across the gambit of audiences : congress, royalty,
venture capital, private equity, non-profits, entertainment & emerging businesses. He
comes to The Ratio in the role of skeptic.