De Kai is a pioneer of AI and author of the award-winning Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future (MIT Press 2025). He invented and built the web's first global online language translator—the technology that spawned Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, and Microsoft Bing Translator.

De Kai is founder of the Empathetic AI Institute and holds joint appointments at HKUST's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. He also serves as an Independent Director of The Future Society, an AI ethics think tank.
 

A leading researcher in artificial intelligence, human language, and music technology, De Kai received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. During his doctoral studies in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics, he worked on seminal projects on intelligent conversational dialogue agents. His PhD dissertation employing maximum entropy to model human perception and interpretation of ambiguities was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward today's state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing technologies.

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For his pioneering contributions to machine learning of the cognitive relationships between different languages, De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of its Founding Fellows. He was also one of eight inaugural members of Google's AI Ethics council.