Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen is a co-founder and CTO of PolyAI, a London-based startup that builds super-human voice AI for contact centres. Under his leadership, the company has attracted more than $30M in venture funding, and has been featured as the 100 most innovative AI companies in CB Insights 2021 and Gartner Cool Vendor 2020. PolyAI was also nominated as the "Company of the Year 2019" by Cambridge Computer Lab Ring, the graduate association of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Previous winners include Deepmind, Improbable, SwiftKey, and Raspberry Pi. PolyAI also builds the first AI agent in restaurants that can hold multi-turn natural conversations with Google Duplex.

Before PolyAI, Shawn worked as a research scientist at Google Brain and a conversational AI consultant at IPSoft Amelia. At IPSoft, he was advising the development of Amelia 3.0, the cognitive engine that is still used by the company today. He holds a PhD from the Dialogue System Group, University of Cambridge, where he worked with Professor Steve Young. His research in conversational AI has attracted 3900+ citations and won several best paper awards including EMNLP 2015 and SigDial 2015. He had also hosted multiple industry seminars at research groups such as Google, Apple, Xerox, and Baidu. Until today, Shawn still plays an important role in the international conversational AI community, including hosting the first two workshops of NLP for Conversational AI and serving as the program chair of the conversational AI track for both ACL and EMNLP.