Sogou COO Liyun Ru Resigns; Jingfang Xu Will Lead the Search Division

Chinese search engine company Sogou announced today that COO Liyun Ru will leave his position on June 30th for personal reasons. Dr. Jingfang Xu will now lead the company’s Search Division and oversee AI smart search development.

According to Sogou CEO Xiaochuan Wang’s announcement, Ru will continue with the company as a consultant, and will likely start his own company in the near future. Wang had kind words for Ru and thanked him for his contributions. In 2010, Ru established a research team for Sogou Search and took charge of the Sogou Search Division, where he advanced the company’s search technologies. Following his promotion to company COO in 2016, Ru also acted as an advisor to CEO Wang regarding Sogou’s strategic blueprint.

Ru’s successor at the Sogou Search Division is Dr. Jingfang Xu, a former head of the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) who also worked with Tsinghua University’s Institute for Network Science and Cyberspace. Xu joined Sogou in 2011 as Chief Manager of the Sogou Search Division and Chief Scientist. She has led development of Sogou search products including its website search engine, Wechat Search and Sogou translation. With a tech focus on natural language processing and machine translation, Xu has also been a leading contributor to Sogou’s AI Development, building a strong foundation that has allowed the company to compete with other search engines.

In his announcement Wang also emphasized that Sogou is committed to the development of revolutionary AI hardware. Sogou is China’s second largest search engine by mobile queries, and the country’s fourth largest Internet company by monthly active users.

Author: Jessie Geng | Editor: Michael Sarazen

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