With the continuous development of mainland society and the continuous strengthening of the country, China's attractiveness in the talent market has gradually surpassed that of the United States.
In recent years, top experts in various fields have poured into China, of which Daniel Povey is a typical example.
In the field of technology such as speech recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Bowei is the world's premier master and a national treasure scholar in the United States.
However, due to the social problems of the United States, such a genius was humiliated twice, and finally he made up his mind to go to China with top technology and made important contributions to the development of science and technology on the mainland.
So, how good is Povey? What kind of humiliation did he suffer from the United States? In so many countries, why did he choose China?
Debuted in Xiaomi, causing a sensation
On November 19, 2019, at the global developer conference held by Xiaomi Group, a blonde foreigner attracted the attention of the audience.
Subsequently, Xiaomi solemnly announced that he would serve as the chief scientist of Xiaomi's speech recognition team.
Suddenly, the audience was in an uproar.
You know, Xiaomi is a major domestic brand, R & D personnel are mostly domestic talents, why should we give up the near and far, the introduction of a foreigner?
However, the experts in charge of the field of artificial intelligence in the audience were not surprised, they looked at each other and smiled, and nodded their heads in understanding.
It turned out that the foreigner on the stage was None other than Daniel Povey.
In the speech recognition world, he has long been known to everyone.
Whether it is Apple's Siri, Alibaba Group's Tmall Genie or Xiaomi's little love classmates, they all use the technology developed by Bowei.
Therefore, the relevant experts in China know him very well.
After the meeting, this blockbuster news attracted a lot of comments.
BM China executives said bluntly: "Daniel Poway is a top expert, the cornerstone of our industry, and his coming to China will definitely help us achieve great breakthroughs."
The leader of Huawei's speech recognition team also said that Powei's arrival "will completely change the industry landscape."
It is worth mentioning that Lei Jun, president of Xiaomi Group, also forwarded this news on his personal Weibo and warmly welcomed the arrival of Bowei.
In fact, Bowei was able to join Xiaomi, which was promoted by Lei Jun, who personally went to the United States to negotiate with Bowei and discuss cooperation.
And said that "you can meet any of your conditions", after feeling the sincerity of Lei Jun, Bo Wei made up his mind to go to China for development.
We all know that Lei Jun is the founder of Xiaomi, and also a high-achieving student graduated from the School of Computer Science of Wuhan University, and he is naturally familiar with the level of technical personnel.
Since he valued Povi so much, Bovi's strength was naturally self-evident.
However, such a talent is a treasure in any country, so why would the United States let him go? Let's start with his life.
Young and famous, with a bright resume
Born in London, England, Povey was known as a "young genius" at a young age, and later naturally entered cambridge university.
During college, Povey found himself interested in speech recognition, so he focused on the field.
But at that time, unlike now, speech recognition was still in the exploratory stage, and there was no good application scenario, so the tutor had advised him many times, hoping that he would choose a more promising direction.
However, in Povi's mind, there is nothing cooler than talking to a machine, so he has strengthened his determination and has been working in this field.
Over the decade from 1993 to 2003, Povey spent his undergraduate to doctoral studies and eventually earned his Ph.D. in speech recognition.
With the development of the times, speech recognition has gradually emerged commercial opportunities, at this time Bo wei is more convinced that his research has far-reaching value.
In the year of graduation, Povi received offers from major companies.
At that time, the United States was a hot land for computer development, so he finally decided to leave his hometown and go to IBM Research Institute to take charge of computer speech recognition.
Unlike The laid-back personality of Americans, Povey was born a workaholic.
Immersed in the laboratory every day, under the combined watering of genius and sweat, Povi also quickly achieved success.
Within a year, he was a member of the IBM Institute's Senior Research Group, published numerous papers in top journals, and began to make a name for himself in the industry.
In 2008, after five years at IBM, Povey first jumped ship, and his next stop was Microsoft Research, which offered him a million-dollar annual salary.
At that time, Microsoft was the world's largest technology company, and the company's internal scientific research strength was second to none, so Powei came to Microsoft and obtained more resources and a larger platform.
Here, he developed the Kaldi system for the first time, and this system is the framework of commercial speech recognition, and software such as Siri and Tmall Genie are built on this framework.
After making great contributions, Microsoft also paid more attention to Povi, giving him promotions and salary increases many times.
However, Microsoft is a commercial company after all, focusing on short-term interests, while Povey is more committed to the long-term development of speech recognition technology.
So in 2012 he resigned again and joined Johns Hopkins University as an associate professor at the Center for Language and Speech Processing.
Clashes and injustices
The academic atmosphere of the university is more intense, so Povi no longer has to be troubled by commercial interests and can concentrate on his research.
It was also during this period that he lectured for students and disseminated professional knowledge, while immersing himself in research and exploring cutting-edge fields.
This rhythm of life has longed for Povey for a long time, so he is also quite satisfied with Johns Hopkins University, where he has been teaching since 2012.
It wasn't until 2019 that something happened that completely changed his mind and made him rethink his future.
It turned out that due to the influence of the Floyd incident, a serious black movement broke out in the United States.
They smashed, looted, burned, and did nothing wrong, but the U.S. government left it alone and let them do whatever they wanted.
Such a laissez-faire attitude has sharply increased the factors of social instability and made it impossible for residents to ensure their lives.
Johns Hopkins University is located in Baltimore City, which has a large proportion of blacks, so it has also been greatly affected.
The original good law and order has also been completely destroyed, and even the campus has been affected, and there have been many vicious injuries.
Because of this, the school responded that a police station would be set up on campus to protect the safety of teachers and students, which would have been a reasonable arrangement.
However, some students were not pleased, and they staged a huge opposition campaign and threatened to strike the school to abolish the police station and all police.
For such an unreasonable request, the school naturally did not agree, so these students intensified, not only blocking the school gates, but also occupying major public places, trying to use this as a bargaining chip.
Povey is a typical "nerd", who has always heard nothing out of the window, and although he is dissatisfied with the behavior of his students, he has never publicly opposed it.
To his surprise, however, his research was interrupted.
It turned out that among the places occupied by the students was Povi's speech recognition research base.
Not only did the students occupy the indoor space of the base, but they also locked the laboratory, and Bovey could not enter for several days, and the work naturally could not be carried out.
In the face of such an emergency, he contacted the school at the first time, however, the school could not do anything about it.
For scientific research, time is life, if Bovey can not continue his own research, then it is likely to let his peers get ahead, and the previous team's efforts can be all in vain.
Therefore, Bo Wei no longer compromised, he first hoped to be able to impress the troublesome students, seeing that this method was ineffective, he led more than 20 graduate students to forcibly regain the key to the laboratory by force.
Povey thinks it should come to an end.
But he never expected that within a month, the school would give him a notice to terminate the contract agreement with him, which also meant that Povi could not continue to serve as a teacher.
For such an unjust result, he naturally could not accept it, but the school played the guise of "endangering the safety of students" and insisted on terminating his contract.
Eventually, Povey had to leave Johns Hopkins University.
Humiliated again, he went to China
Fortunately, Povey is a top expert, and his departure has excited major U.S. technology companies.
On the day of the termination, he received an olive branch from Google and other companies, and after some careful consideration, Povey finally decided to go to Facebook and continue to engage in the research work he loved.
However, things are far from simple.
When Facebook figured out the real reason for Bovey's departure, the enthusiastic HR department broke up and repeatedly delayed entry.
Later, Povi learned that Facebook originally wanted to hold a press conference and ask Bovey to apologize publicly, otherwise it would not be able to enter the job.
Povi just took back his own laboratory, without any mistakes at all, let alone an apology, so he decisively refused the request.
After that, Facebook proposed another solution, which completely angered him.
Originally, in order to avoid responsibility, Facebook proposed to let Povi join in the form of a 6-month short-term contract, and then regularize it after the end of the social impact.
The idea of having one of the industry's top experts as contractors was a formidable humiliation, so Povey was furious and sent the email directly online and refused any further communication.
Not only that, but Povey was also completely disappointed in the United States, and he began to consider whether he should find another way to choose a country that paid more attention to science and was more relaxed and liberal.
Soon, Beijing Aishu Intelligent Technology sent him an invitation to serve as the chief consultant.
Povey had heard of this fast-growing startup and gladly accepted it.
Of course, the consultant role is more special, do not need to work for it full-time, and Pove is thinking about whether to go to China and officially join a company.
At this time, Xiaomi heard the news and immediately communicated with Poway.
Since its listing, Xiaomi has gained fame in Europe and the United States, and Bowei naturally knows this vibrant company, so it has shown its interest.
However, he still has some worries about the working environment and living environment.
Therefore, Lei Jun personally communicated with him and promised to meet all his requirements, which completely dispelled his concerns.
In this way, Povey left the United States satisfied and boarded a plane to Beijing, China.
Xiaomi attaches great importance to this genius scientist, and when he first joined, he served as the chief scientist of the speech recognition team.
So there was the scene we mentioned at the beginning, at the global developer conference held by Xiaomi, Powei appeared.
And this also opened the curtain on his work in China.
Make breakthroughs to help China's development
After coming to China, relying on a more open platform and a stronger academic atmosphere, Powei's research has gone smoothly.
In November 2020, he was invited to participate in the fifth Kaldi Technical Exchange Conference in China and was awarded the honorary title of Honorary Consultant of the Technical Community.
In May 2021, he officially announced that the research has made great progress, and Xiaomi's speech recognition 2.0 technology has been preliminarily completed.
This also means that in areas such as speech recognition and artificial intelligence, the mainland has come to a leading position.
With the blessing of this technology, the mainland will also add wings in cutting-edge technologies such as autonomous driving and robot production.
It can be seen that the arrival of Povi has indeed made outstanding contributions to the mainland.
However, when he left his post, there were actually many developed countries that wanted to win him over, but he chose China instead.
Later, in an interview with CCTV, Po wei said the real reason.
It turned out that he saw the development of China in recent years, and the progress of Chinese scholars in the field of scientific research was also well known.
By consulting relevant materials, he found that China's current scientific research atmosphere is far from being comparable to Europe and the United States.
More importantly, China has a more stable social environment, and the government has invested heavily in ensuring that scientists can work with peace of mind.
Not only that, but China has also given Povi enough respect, as a top talent, he can get a good salary wherever he is, but respect is particularly valuable.
What happened in the United States made him no longer trust the West, so China naturally became his only choice.
summary
In recent years, more and more talents have poured into China from Europe and the United States, whether it is a 16-year-old genius prodigy in France who has been heavily recruited by Huawei, or a Belgian expert who has offered Tencent a 2 million annual salary increase, all of which have achieved success in their respective fields.
Among those people, though, Daniel Powell is undoubtedly the most heavyweight, after all, he single-handedly laid the foundation for speech recognition technology and made the industry change dramatically.
Povey's willingness to come to China fully shows that China has become the first choice for talent inflow, as Povey said: "It is easier to get along with Chinese because they do not have American political correctness".
And this will also help us attract more talents, thus bringing unique advantages to the future development of the mainland.