Dr Feiyu Xu is multi-award-winning researcher and pioneer for artificial intelligence. She is co-founder of Nyonic where she was Chief Innovation Officer until February 2024. Previously, she was Senior Vice President and Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at SAP, where she led SAP’s AI strategy and its holistic implementation.
Feiyu Xu studied technical translation at Tongji University in Shanghai after being nominated and selected for admission to the university in 1987 without taking the national entrance examination. She then studied Computational Linguistics at Saarland University from 1992 to 1998 and graduated with honours with an MSc degree. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “bootstrapping relation extraction from semantic seed” in the field of “information extraction”. In 2014 she habilitated in Big Text Data Analytics. She was initially a senior researcher at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and led the text analytics research group at the Language Technology Lab. She was also co-founder and managing director of Yocoy Technologies GmbH, a DFKI spin-off company founded in 2007. From March 2017 to March 2020, Feiyu Xu was Vice President of Lenovo Group and Head of AI Lab, Lenovo Research. 2020 she moved to SAP and 2023 she was co-founder of Nyonic which develops generative AI technologies and large-scale language models.
Feiyu Xu is a member of the Supervisory Board of the ZF Group and Chairwoman of the Asia Berlin Forum e.V., an organisation dedicated to connecting Asia and Europe. In 2013, she received the Google Focused Research Award for her contribution to the field of natural language processing. In 2014, she was awarded the DFKI Research Fellow award, the highest honour for researchers at DFKI. In 2019, Feiyu Xu was included in the Forbes list of China’s Top 50 Women in Technology. At the Global AI Application Product Expo 2019 in China, she was honoured as one of the Top 10 People of the Year in Chinese Artificial Intelligence. Feiyu Xu has published over 100 research papers, many of them at internationally renowned AI conferences such as ACL, COLING, EMNLP, CONLL, NAACL and LREC. She was also the section head of Text Mining, Information Extraction and Question Answering Systems at EACL 2017 and the section head of Text Mining and Question Answering Systems at ACL 2018.
Feiyu impresses with her extensive and in-depth experience in the entire innovation cycle of her fields – from basic research, application and development to products and their commercialisation.
