From: Jinyu Li (SPEECH)
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 10:36 AM
Subject: Sad news about Yajie Miao, our future colleague
Yajie Miao, a rising star in the speech community, was supposed to be on board yesterday. I’m extremely sad to inform you that our future colleague was dead in accident in China recently. As Yajie’s intern mentor and thesis committee member, I am now in deeply grief.
苗亞傑是一個語音領域冉冉升起的新星，本應該昨天入職。我非常沉痛地通知你們，我們這個未來的同事最近在中國遭遇事故已經身亡。作為亞傑的實習導師和論文委員會成員，我現在非常悲痛。
Yajie is the super-star among Ph.D. students, he has 500+ citations which is very hard to achieve by a Ph.D. student. He has done one-term internship at Microsoft, significantly contributing to the development of frame-skipping LSTM which is critical to the shipping of LSTM. He also helped us to start the CTC project at Microsoft. Yajie is famous for his pioneering work in CTC. He has spent most of his later Ph.D. study time to work on and promote CTC to the speech community. As his thesis committee member, I was involved in the process from his thesis proposal to defense. I was amazed that he didn’t put his well-known CTC work into the thesis, and he answered to me that his thesis topic was pre-determined but CTC is the way to his dream. On the first day Yajietouched ASR when it was still dominated by GMMs, he was bothered by the super-complicated model building process and he set up his ultimate dream to simplifying the ASR model building process. After reading Alex Graves’ initial CTC work, Yajie believed this is the right way to simplified ASR model building process and worked very hard on it. His EESEN toolkit is the only popular CTC toolkit in speech community and significantly boost the progress of CTC study in the whole community. While other Ph.D. students are fighting hard on their thesis, Yajie is the exceptional person who fights for his dream. This stands Yajie out of his peers, and I am sure together with his talents there is an even bright future waiting for him after he joins Microsoft.
亞傑在衆多博士生中是個超級明星，他作為博士生有非常難得的超過500次的引用。他已經完成了一期微軟的實習，對于跳幀LSTM，也就是LSTM的傳輸關鍵的開發有着顯著貢獻。他也幫助我們在微軟開啟了CTC項目。亞傑因在CTC工作的創新上而出名。他為了研究和提升語音的CTC已經耗費了博士學習期間的大部分時間。作為他的論文委員會成員，從他的開題報告到答辯我一直參與其中。我很驚訝他并沒有把他最出名的工作CTC寫進論文裡，他回答我說他的論文題目是提前決定的，CTC是實現他夢想的途徑。亞傑第一天接觸ASR的時候，那是ASR還是由GMMs主導的，他對于超級複雜模型的搭建過程感覺很煩惱，于是下定決心要簡化ASR模型的搭建步驟。在閱讀了Alex Graves最初的CTC工作的相關資料後，亞傑确信這是簡化ASR模型搭建的正确途徑并且對此開始了非常努力的研究。他的EESEN工具是在語音領域唯一熱門的CTC工具，這個工具顯著加速了CTC研發的進程。當其他博士生在為自己的論文而奮鬥的時候，亞傑已經成為一個為自己夢想而奮鬥的傑出的人。這讓亞傑在同齡人中脫穎而出，加上他的天賦，我很确定他加入微軟後會有一個更加光明的未來。
However, at such an important point of his life, the tragedy comes. His life is like a shooting star, short but bright. This is a huge loss to himself and his family, and to Microsoft. We wish him the best in the heaven. I am thinking what we can do for Yajie and his family during this hard time. Donation may be an option, but please let me know if there is any other option you believe better. We will definitely continue the CTC work to finally realize his dream.
但是悲劇降臨在他生命中如此重要的一刻。他的一生如同流星般短暫但是耀眼。這對于亞傑和他的家人，還有微軟是個巨大的損失。我們祝福他在天堂得以安息。在這段艱難的時期裡我一直在思考我們可以為亞傑和他的家人做些什麼。也許捐款是個方式，不過如果有别的更好的選擇請告訴我。我們一定會繼續研究CTC項目來實現他的夢想。