25 Facts About Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee is a Taiwanese businessman, computer scientist, investor, and writer.

Kai-Fu Lee became the focus of a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft, his former employer, due to a one-year non-compete agreement that he signed with Microsoft in 2000 when he became its corporate vice president of interactive services.

Kai-Fu Lee is a micro-blogger in China, in particular on Sina Weibo, where he has over 50 million followers.

Kai-Fu Lee is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China.

Kai-Fu Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.

In 1973, Kai-Fu Lee immigrated to the United States and attended Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Kai-Fu Lee voluntarily relinquished his US citizenship in 2011 and retained only his Taiwanese nationality, citing the reason as wanting to "get back to [his] roots" after his aging.

At Carnegie Mellon, Kai-Fu Lee worked on topics in machine learning and pattern recognition.

Kai-Fu Lee has written two books on speech recognition and more than 60 papers in computer science.

Together with Alex Waibel, another Carnegie Mellon researcher, Kai-Fu Lee edited Readings in Speech Recognition.

Kai-Fu Lee moved to Silicon Graphics in 1996 and spent a year as the Vice President of its Web Products division, and another year as president of its multimedia software division, Cosmo Software.

In 1998, Kai-Fu Lee moved to Microsoft and went to Beijing, China where he played a key role in establishing the Microsoft Research division there.

Kai-Fu Lee returned to the United States in 2000 and was promoted to corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft from 2000 to 2005.

In July 2005, Kai-Fu Lee left Microsoft to take a position at Google.

On July 28,2005, Washington state Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez granted Microsoft a temporary restraining order, which prohibited Kai-Fu Lee from working on Google projects that compete with Microsoft pending a trial scheduled for January 9,2006.

Kai-Fu Lee was still allowed to recruit employees for Google in China and to talk to government officials about licensing, but was prohibited from working on technologies such as search or speech recognition.

Kai-Fu Lee was prohibited from setting budgets, salaries, and research directions for Google in China until the case was to go to trial in January 2006.

At Google China, Kai-Fu Lee helped establish the company in the market and oversaw its growth in the country.

Kai-Fu Lee strengthened the company's teams of engineers and scientists in the country.

On September 4,2009, Kai-Fu Lee announced his resignation from Google.

Kai-Fu Lee is an active investor, corralling large amounts of venture capital for the financing, incubation, gestation, and establishment of new high-technology startup companies around the world.

In September 2010, Kai-Fu Lee described two Google Android projects for Chinese users: Tapas, a smartphone operating system tailored for Chinese users; and Wandoujia, a desktop phone manager for Android.

Kai-Fu Lee was barred from Weibo for three days after he used Weibo to complain about China's Internet controls.

Kai-Fu Lee was a vocal critic of the government's blocking of GitHub, which he said was detrimental to China's competitiveness.

Kai-Fu Lee posted on Weibo on September 5,2013, that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma.