Dr. Yuqing Gao is a Senior Research and Engineering Director currently leading AI Research at Cisco. Throughout her distinguished career at Google, AWS, Microsoft, and IBM, she has spearheaded foundational innovations in AI and search. Her leadership includes driving AI Summarization and Gen-AI grounding for Google Search, launching Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart and Canvas, leading Microsoft’s Satori Knowledge Graph and Bing Entity Search, and early days innovating in speech-to-speech translation and language models at IBM Research. An IEEE Fellow and recipient of the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award, Dr. Gao was recognized by MIT Technology Review for leading one of the “ten emerging technologies that will change the world.” She has published over 120 papers, holds 35 patents, and has been honored with two DARPA awards and an IEEE Best Paper Award. She was named one of Business Insider’s “54 women who rocked the tech world.”