William I. Chang received the A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard University and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.  A theorist as well as empiricist, Dr. Chang has a track record of entering emerging fields and working from the bottom up to the top.  In 1991 he entered the budding field of computational biology as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in record time mapped the genome of an organism important to cancer research.  He then invented an effective protein sequence search engine based on evolutional principles.  In 1996 he invented scalable real-time indexing of natural language phrases, thus creating the first truly accurate and easy-to-use search engine for the WWW, Infoseek.  (Dr. Chang has referred to Infoseek as a Chinese search engine for English.)  Its enterprise software counterpart, called Ultraseek, is still widely used by large institutions around the world.  In 1997 he discovered and mentored Robin Li, who went on to found Baidu.com.  Ten years later Dr. Chang has joined Baidu.com as Chief

Scientist and has taken on myriad roles ranging from technologist to mentor to organizational architect to product strategist.

In this talk, given in Chinese, we will closely describe Baidu’s five key competitive advantages that have enabled Baidu.com to become the fourth most trafficked web site in the world.  They are: Chinese language web search with advanced phrase processing and the largest and freshest index; an R&D process of rapid, continual product refinement; vertical and community products including the Q&A format iKnow.Baidu.com (which logs each month over one million questions answered); an advertising business based on

innovative search technology that helps to propel China’s economic and societal growth; and finally a system and methodology for cultivating talent.  This talk will be given in the form of a diary: the new Chief Scientist’s first hundred days at Baidu, and will outline a series of strategic initiatives aimed at bringing about Baidu’s next generation search engine platform and products.  Interspersed will be specific, actionable methods that have been proven successful in the field as well as in life.