Feiyu Xu

Board Mentor
Criticaleye

Dr. Feiyu Xu is an AI expert whose career is distinguished by leading positions in research and industry. Dr. Xu is Non-Executive Director of Airbus Group and is member of supervisory board of the ZF Group.  Dr. Feiyu Xu was co-founder of nyonic from July 2023 to March 2024.

Dr. Xu was Senior Vice President at SAP SE, where she oversaw the intelligent transformation of the corporation as Global Head of Artificial Intelligence. Her first mission at SAP was to define an AI strategy dedicated to enriching a range of products by AI and to orchestrate the implementation of the AI strategy. Part of this strategy is a well concerted participation of all relevant core operational and support functions in this process, thus tightly connecting R&D, productization, marketing, human resources, sales and partners. The SAP ecosystem of customers and partners was also successfully included in the strategy supported by novel legal models for securing the sharing of data and benefits.

Before joining SAP, Dr. Xu was Vice President of Lenovo Group and Head of the AI Lab at Lenovo Research from March 2017 to March 2020. She designed and led the Lenovo overall AI technology strategy, and she was acknowledged for substantial contributions to the intelligent transformation of Lenovo. She also contributed substantially to the unified Data Strategy of Lenovo Group. She identified opportunities and needs for AI in the core business areas of Lenovo, especially in personal computers, intelligent devices and data centers. Under her leadership, the AI Lab developed various AI solutions for Lenovo, mainly by applying and combining advanced AI technologies such as natural language processing, voice technology, computer vision, machine learning, and smart data. She assured that these technologies were integrated with other enabling technologies such as IoT, cloud computing and big data analytics. During her employment at Lenovo, she was based at the company’s headquarter in Beijing.

In 2013, she won a Google Focused Research Award for her contribution in the field of natural language processing. One year later, she was awarded the honor of DFKI Research Fellow, the highest distinction for researchers at DFKI. She has published more than a hundred research papers. Many of them at top-level NLP/AI conferences. She also served as a workshop, program, section chair for various international conferences. In 2014, she was appointed DFKI Research Fellow, the highest honor for DFKI researchers. In 2019, she was selected as Forbes China List of Top 50 Women in Tech. In 2021, she was honored by the magazin “Handelsblatt” as one of the 100 women who drive the innovation in Germany.

Before moving to Germany, Feiyu Xu had studied technical translation at Tongji University in Shanghai. In Saarbruecken she studied computational linguistics at Saarland University and graduated by receiving a Diploma (MSc) with distinction. Through her research results and the development of successful applications, Dr. Xu has been able to prove her broad expertise across central areas of AI, in particular in AI platform development, conversational AI, knowledge graphs, information extraction, business intelligence and big-data text analytics. In her executive roles in technology industry, she obtained extensive experience in the entire cycle of innovation ranging from basic research via AI development all the way to products and their commercialization.