For our second seminar in our series on "Topics in International Technology Management: Innovations in AI from Asia", we'll have guest speaker Shixiang Shane Gu, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Shane joins Dr. Richard Dasher, Stanford's US-Asia Technology Management Center's Director, to give his thoughts on AI opportunities in China and Japan.

Shixiang Shane Gu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist in Google DeepMind, where he leads a team in Gemini Thinking and Post-Training. Previously, he led Multilinguality team in Gemini Post-Training, was a senior researcher in the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, an ex-Research Scientist at Google Research, Brain Team and a Visiting Associate Professor (Adjunct Professor) at the University of Tokyo. Shane holds PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Richard E. Turner, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Bernhard Schölkopf. Shane holds B.ASc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, supervised by the thesis advisor Geoffrey E. Hinton. Shane previously was also a visiting scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University hosted by Emma Brunskill. Shane's academic work received Best Paper Award at CoRL 2019, Google Focused Research Award, Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Fellowship, and NSERC Scholarship, and was featured in Google Research Blogpost and MIT Technology Review. Shane is a Japan-born Chinese Canadian, and he speaks, reads, and writes in three languages. 

—

Stanford students may register for 1-unit seminar credit; course EASTASN-402A, cross listed as EE-402A and EALC-402A. While technical approaches will be introduced, most content should be accessible with only a general IT user background.

---

Our seminar series on "Topics in International Technology Management: Innovations in AI from Asia" continues weekly until December 2, 2025. Seminars are open to the public and will be held in-person and on Zoom, Tuesdays, 4:30 PM – 5:50 PM.