{"id":4230,"date":"2016-01-12T17:17:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T22:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=4230"},"modified":"2017-05-12T15:08:11","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T19:08:11","slug":"watch-bro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2016\/01\/watch-bro\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Watch Bro’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Watch<\/a>Zhifei Li (PhD \u201910) believes that computers should be able to see, hear, feel, and move. But, he adds, mostly they need to be able to speak to us and respond intelligently to what we say.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology exists to make a positive impact on people\u2019s lives, and to do that, we need to enable better human-machine interaction,\u201d says Li, who grew up dreaming of being a scientist or engineer while working the fields on his family\u2019s farm in China\u2019s mountainous Hunan province.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, childhood dreams do come true. Now 39, Li is founder and CEO of Mobvoi<\/a>, a Beijing-based start-up making headlines not only for its innovative work building the \u201cnext generation\u201d mobile voice search engine, but also more recently, for TicWatch, China\u2019s answer to Apple Watch and Android Wear.<\/p>\n

Billed as a quintessentially Chinese device, the sleek, stylish TicWatch<\/a> (about $160 U.S.) lets wearers use their voices to do everything from finding the closest karaoke bar open past 2 a.m. to remotely controlling the dishwashers in their apartments. To wake the device, users simply say \u201cNi hao Wenwen,\u201d (Chinese for \u201chello\u201d), and it springs to life. TicWatch also includes a sensitive touchscreen, as well as a so-called \u201cTickle strip\u201d slide sensor on the side, increasing its functionality. In April, Li and Mobvoi held \u201cCreaTic,\u201d the first of many hackathons aimed at ensuring that TicWatch and its operating system, TicWear (launched in 2014), remain game-changers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is only the beginning,\u201d promises Li, whose nickname in China is \u201cWatch Bro.\u201d \u201cWe are looking at many new ideas, including \u2018Pace,\u2019 a music app that can select music based on the cadence of your steps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Li envisions a world where all of our \u201csmart\u201d devices \u2013 from smart-watches to cars to home appliances to, eventually, robots \u2013 are connected and are able to sort through all the fragmented data they collect about where we go, what we do, and what we want, and are not only able to anticipate what we need but also provide it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce these dots are connected, the value [of our devices] will really shine,\u201d he predicts.<\/p>\n

Li\u2019s interest in artificial intelligence technologies that will enable people to have fast and natural interactions with mobile devices him to the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Center for Language and Speech Processing<\/a>, for his doctorate.<\/p>\n

\u201cJohns Hopkins was my ideal choice because CLSP is one of the best in its field,\u201d he said. \u201cAt CLSP, I got to work with and for the best scholars in the world across different fields, including Sanjeev Khudanpur<\/a> of electrical and computer engineering<\/a> and Jason Eisner<\/a> and David Yarowsky<\/a> of computer science.<\/a> The high standard of the research culture there is the thing I treasure most about my time there.\u201d<\/p>\n

While at WSE, Li built Joshua<\/a>, the widely used, open-source mainstream software for machine translation. After receiving his PhD, Li went to work for Google as a research scientist, where he created Google\u2019s mobile offline translation system, which now supports 90 languages and serves hundreds of millions of users.<\/p>\n

But in 2012, with a \u201cheart devoted to making an impact on my own country using the knowledge that I had accumulated,\u201d Li returned to China and started Mobvoi (later in 2013, his former Google colleague, Xin Lei, a speech recognition researcher, joined his startup as the Chief Technology Officer). Among the company\u2019s first projects was Chumen Wenwen, the Chinese version of Siri, followed by TicWear and TicWatch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are really only in the early stages of what artificial intelligence and human machine interaction are capable of,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zhifei Li (PhD \u201910) believes that computers should be able to see, hear, feel, and move. But, he adds, mostly they need to be able to speak to us and respond intelligently to what we say. \u201cTechnology exists to make a positive impact on people\u2019s lives, and to do that, we need to enable better…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[119,131,217,218,219,220,221,222,223,224,225,226],"class_list":["post-4230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-department-of-computer-science","tag-department-of-electrical-and-computer-engineering","tag-zhifei-li","tag-mobvoi","tag-chumen-wenwen","tag-ticwatch","tag-xin-lei","tag-sanjeev-khudanpur","tag-jason-eisner","tag-david-yarowksy","tag-clsp","tag-center-for-language-and-speech-processing","issue-winter-2016"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n'Watch Bro' - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2016\/01\/watch-bro\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"'Watch Bro' - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Zhifei Li (PhD \u201910) believes that computers should be able to see, hear, feel, and move. 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