Personal site
Zihao Zheng
AI Infrastructure & Speech-Language Systems Architect
Building reliable, explainable, and verifiable AI at production scale
About
More about me →I am an AI Infrastructure & Speech-Language Systems Architect. Previously, I was a founding core AI architect of Alibaba's Tmall Genie, where I designed the NLU domain-classification engine and end-to-end ASR architecture serving tens of millions of households. Before that, I received my B.Sc. in Information and Computing Science from South China Normal University.
I am the primary author of standalone TensorBoard
(dmlc/tensorboard),
first inventor on two granted patents in
speech and language systems, and a former
Apache MXNet
PMC Member and Committer.
I care about building AI that operators can inspect, verify, and trust at
production scale.
Selected work
Standalone TensorBoard
Primary author of dmlc/tensorboard. Decoupled TensorBoard from
TensorFlow so MXNet and PyTorch teams could inspect training without
framework lock-in. Adopted by AWS as the basis for mxboard;
referenced by PyTorch's tensorboardX.
Indicator Loss for Context-Aware ASR
First inventor on patent CN113808593B. Explicit, step-level supervised gating for personalized speech recognition — deployed on Tmall Genie at national scale, enabling real-time bias-list updates without weeks-long retraining.
Memory-Network NLU for Tmall Genie
First inventor on patent CN112002313B. Replaced brittle rule-template routing with a memory-network architecture fusing rules and learned representations, raising production domain-classification accuracy from ~65% to ~85%.
Academic Services
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Conference Program Committee Member / Reviewer
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Industry Track, 2026
- ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) Research & Practice Notes and Demos Tracks, 2026
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Workshop Reviewer
- Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text (WNUT), @EMNLP 2026
- Efficient Representation Learning for Multimodal Information Retrieval (EReL@MIR), @ACM MM 2026
Recent Posts
All posts →-
blog
How I became an IEEE Senior Member — and how I can refer you
A practical walkthrough of my IEEE Senior Member elevation, what the application asks for, and an open offer to refer qualified peers in AI infrastructure, speech, and language systems.
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