Lili Cheng – Women of Interaction Design

Lili Cheng

Bringing Human Conversation into Technology with Bots

Written by Erin Malone

Lili Cheng is a researcher whose work straddles both Apple and Microsoft. After starting her career at Apple, she moved over to Microsoft, where she has been the last 20 years and as of 2017, she is Corporate VP working in AI and Research.

Trained originally as an architect, she jumped from architecture into Apple in 1993, working on Quicktime VR and Quicktime Conferencing. Two years later she moved to Microsoft to work in their Virtual Worlds research group working on v-chat and comic chat—IRC systems, which were part of Microsoft’s social applications and chat built into early versions of Internet Explorer. In 2001 she started the Social Computing Group and explored a variety of social networking prototypes some of which shipped, some of which spun-out into other companies and some which were just future visions.

Screenshot including graphic images by Jim Woodring as part of the Comic Chat product by Microsoft, circa 1995.

Cheng was the lead for the Windows Vista release, overseeing design, user research, customer support and other areas of the product development and launch. More recently she has been leading the company’s research and development into social interactions through conversational bots using artificial intelligence and databases of sample conversation. She founded the Social Computing Group and Future Social Experience Labs at the company in 2009 while simultaneously working on her master’s degree from NYU’s ITP program.

One of her group’s projects which launched in 2016 shows the power of combining A.I. with bot technology and how A.I. data can be problematic and biased even when the development and design is led by a woman of color. The bot launched and was spouting racist conversation within a day of launching. In a follow up interview, Cheng explained, “the lesson of Tay isn’t that bots are bad; it’s just more thought needs to be given to the humans who use them. A huge part is about human conversation and what works, social norms.”[1]

Cheng is currently Corporate Vice President over Microsoft A.I. and Research and holds a handful of patents around user data mining, system architectures providing context and navigation. Her current focus is on conversational AI which underpins their bot software and bot framework, as well as Cognitive services for vision, speech, language understanding and knowledge APIs, which are finding their way into many of Microsoft’s products.

Footnotes

[1] Ina Fried, “The Human Looking to Put More Humanity into Microsoft’s Bots,” Vox, April 6, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11585878/lili-cheng-microsoft-bots.

Hear more about AI & Bots from Lili Cheng
Lili Cheng on making bots more human
Podcast conversation between Adam Risman and Lili Cheng. https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/microsoft-lili-cheng-bots/

Humanizing AI development: Lessons from China and Xiaoice at Microsoft
Keynote lecture by Lili Cheng at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, NY 2016
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/humanizing-ai-development-lessons-from-china-and-xiaoice-at-microsoft/

Bibliography

Bort, Julie. “The 43 Most Powerful Female Engineers of 2017.” Business Insider, February 22, 2017. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-female-engineers-of-2017-2017-2.
Cheng, Lili. “Humanizing AI Development: Lessons from China and Xiaoice at Microsoft.” O’Reilly Media, September 27, 2016. https://www.oreilly.com/radar/humanizing-ai-development-lessons-from-china-and-xiaoice-at-microsoft/.
Fried, Ina. “The Human Looking to Put More Humanity into Microsoft’s Bots.” Vox, April 6, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11585878/lili-cheng-microsoft-bots.
On the Dot Woman. “Lili Cheng: She’s a Robot Boss.” onthedotwoman.com, June 22, 2017. https://onthedotwoman.com/woman/lili-cheng.
patents.justia.com. “Lili Cheng Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search.” Accessed September 14, 2022. https://patents.justia.com/inventor/lili-cheng.
Risman, Adam. “Microsoft’s Lili Cheng on Making Bots More Human.” The Intercom Blog, August 9, 2018. https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/microsoft-lili-cheng-bots/.