Yi-Min Wang

Corporate Vice President & AI Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s Business Applications Group

• BS, Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1986
• MS, Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 1990
• PhD, Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 1993

Yi-Min Wang is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Artificial Intelligence for Microsoft’s Business Applications Group. He leads the Research & Development efforts in building AI-powered solutions that aim at transforming enterprise business processes. Yi-Min has been with Microsoft for over 22 years and has contributed to the company through a multitude of different roles.

At the start of his career with Microsoft in the early 2000’s, Yi-Min led a Cybersecurity research team to develop anti-malware technologies to protect Windows customers. In 2005, he invented the Strider HoneyMonkey – the first automated system to patrol the Web and hunt for malicious websites that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. The HoneyMonkey technique has become a standard for both the security industry and the search engine industry. In the second half of 2000's, Yi-Min acted as the "Search Quality Czar" for Microsoft's search engine. The search quality monitoring and auto root-cause analysis systems Yi-Min's team developed were widely recognized as key contributing factors to Bing's subsequent success.

In 2007, Yi-Min invented the Strider Search Ranger – the first search-spam detection system based on dynamic crawling and traffic analysis. The work was featured in the New York Times and has had an industry-wide impact on wiping out search-spam. In 2015, he was promoted to a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist for establishing a company-wide reputation for both effective and creative management. From 2015 to 2017, Yi-Min was Managing Director of Microsoft Research Technologies where they shipped the Skype Translator to help break human language barriers and the Word Flow keyboard technology that broke two Guinness World Records. In 2017, Yi-Min’s organization incubated Customer Care Intelligence Virtual Agent and Sales Intelligence Predictive Lead Scoring, both of which have since become Dynamics 365 products.

Yi-Min was elected an IEEE Fellow (2010) for his contributions to Dependable Computing and Web Security. He has also received the Robert T. Chien Memorial Award (1993) for excellence in research and Distinguished Alumni Award (2014) for his contributions to dependable computing and web security, and leadership in industrial research, both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois.

Current as of 2020.