Bio

Wang Haifeng is a Chinese computer scientist. He is the chief technology officer of Baidu, a position he has held since May 2019, the managing director of Baidu Research, the head of Baidu's AI Group, and the director of the National Engineering Research Center of Deep Learning Technology and Application. He served as the first Chinese president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2013 and chaired the founding of the ACL Asia-Pacific Chapter in 2018.

Education

Wang completed all three of his computer-science degrees at the Harbin Institute of Technology: a Bachelor of Science in 1993, a Master of Science in 1996, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1999.

Career

Wang joined Baidu in 2010 and rose through the company's research and product organizations. He oversaw Baidu's core search products from 2014 to 2017, was promoted to vice president in 2013 and senior vice president in 2018, and was appointed chief technology officer in May 2019. The CTO role placed him at the head of Baidu Research, the AI Group (AIG), and the company's deep learning engineering and platform efforts.

His research and product portfolio at Baidu has centered on natural language processing and pre-trained language models. He has been the principal technical figure behind the ERNIE pre-trained-language-model family launched in 2019 and the consumer-facing ERNIE Bot product (Wenxin Yiyan), which Wang has cited in public statements as having reached more than 430 million users.

Outside the operating role at Baidu, Wang has been one of the most active Chinese scientists in international computational-linguistics governance. He served as the first Chinese president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2013, in the association's fifty-year history at the time, and was the founding chair of its Asia-Pacific Chapter in 2018. He directs the National Engineering Research Center of Deep Learning Technology and Application, the China Ministry of Science and Technology research center hosted at Baidu.

Notable contributions

Wang's published record includes more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers in venues such as ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGIR, KDD, and Nature Machine Intelligence, alongside more than one hundred Chinese and international patents.

• ERNIE family. Principal technical lead on Baidu's pre-trained language-model series, from ERNIE 1.0 in 2019 through ERNIE 5.0 in November 2025.
• ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan). Consumer-facing chat product launched in 2023.
• First Chinese ACL president (2013). The first Chinese-affiliated researcher to hold the role in the association's history.
• ACL Asia-Pacific Chapter founding chair (2018).
• Honors. ACL Fellow; IEEE Fellow (2022); CAAI Fellow; Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences; National Outstanding Engineer (2024); National Science and Technology Progress Award of China (2015); National Technological Invention Award of China (2021).

Affiliations

• Harbin Institute of Technology: Bachelor's, master's, and doctoral student in computer science, 1989 to 1999.
• Baidu: Researcher and executive, 2010 to present; Vice President from 2013; Senior Vice President from 2018; Chief Technology Officer from May 2019.
• National Engineering Research Center of Deep Learning Technology and Application: Director.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Wang is the senior technical executive at the most diversified AI portfolio in China, spanning the ERNIE foundation-model family, the Apollo Go autonomous-driving program, the Kunlunxin custom AI chip line, and the Baidu AI Cloud platform. The ERNIE 4.5 release in March 2025 was published as open-weights through Baidu's Hugging Face channel, while the ERNIE 5.0 omni-modal flagship and the ERNIE X1 reasoning model line have remained closed-weights with API access. The bifurcated weights strategy has been associated with Wang's technical direction.

His Western-academic engagement through ACL leadership distinguishes him from peer Chinese chief technology officers. Birth year is not publicly disclosed in English-language sources. Wang's personal homepage, the Baidu investor-relations page, and ACL member directories collectively document the rest of his public record.

Sources

• Haifeng Wang personal homepage. Personal academic homepage with publication list and biographical summary.
• Haifeng Wang Baidu Investor Relations. Official corporate biography.
• Baidu names AI chief Wang Haifeng as new CTO. Yicai Global coverage of the May 2019 CTO appointment.
• Haifeng Wang on The Org. Baidu organizational chart entry with role history.