Others

Rob Moore

My Friendship with Victor Zue

It all began on Saturday afternoon, September 4th, 1965, at the University of Florida in Gainesville and has now endured for more than sixty years. My roommate, Walt Stewart, and I were in our tiny two-room dormitory suite awaiting the arrival of our as-yet-unknown third roommate when there was a knock on the door. Much to our surprise in walked two oriental gentlemen. The Vietnam War was in full force at that time so we were a bit startled and feared that an invasion was happening. After settling our nerves, we made introductions and learned that Victor Zue was our new roommate. Because Victor had left Hong Kong a few days earlier and had been in America for only thirty-eight hours, Victor was accompanied by his future brother-in-law, Paul Pao, because Victor did not speak English, none at all. I still cannot imagine the culture shock that Victor was experiencing at that moment. Paul gave us some background information about Victor and departed shortly thereafter. Needless to say that Walt and I were perplexed by the challenge we faced in having a roommate who did not speak English so rudimentary sign language became the order of the day. As Christians Walt & I both wanted to help Victor in any way we could, but we hardly knew where to start. Our first outing was for supper at the nearby College Inn cafeteria where Victor experienced genuine American cuisine, perhaps for the first time. Classes started on Tuesday so the daily grind began. Victor was somehow able to navigate his way around our enormous campus, attend classes without understanding a word said and find his way back to our dormitory. Most importantly he gradually began to build an English vocabulary, and a familiarity with campus life. Wisely Victor was taking only one heavy reading course, social science material. Each week’s reading assignment required about 115 pages of fairly difficult material. Victor’s work ethic and determination to succeed were breathtaking. With his Chinese-English dictionary, he would write the Chinese character next to each word and eventually read what he had translated two or three times to gain some sense of the material. He would eventually go to bed at 4:00 a.m. each night. He tried to catch up with sleep on the weekends, but he was usually in a constant state of fatigue. We were impressed with his work ethic obviously and even more impressed when he came back with A’s on all of his other science & math course tests. It was then that we began to recognize that Victor’s intellect was far above average. This trend only gathered steam throughout his academic career at Florida as he garnered almost every honor that the engineering college awarded. Of course, those honors continued to come his way after a few years of adjustment to the much tougher competition at MIT.

Victor’s adjustment and assimilation into American life were a joy to watch. We encouraged him to attend the first home football game of the season, but he declined so that he could study. Our dormitory was only about 100 yards or so from the football stadium so Victor was well aware of the shouting fans at the game and roars when something of note happened. He became sufficiently curious about it all and came over to watch some of the second half. He was hooked. He came to the second game a week later, a victory against LSU. The following Monday he went to the nearby physical education office and checked out a football. He wanted to learn how to throw a football like Steve Spurrier, our first-string quarterback. We all smiled. It was then that we knew that Victor had possibilities and that his assimilation into American life was assured.

There were not many oriental students at the UF, and they were rare in our Murphree Area dormitories so Victor was a bit of a curiosity to many of the almost exclusively Caucasian students. Despite his different appearance he gathered friends and admirers more quickly than anyone I ever knew. People simply liked him though I often wondered whether he was even aware of his popularity.

As Victor’s knowledge of English began to build, I was then in a position to help him with correct pronunciations, word usage, grammar and so on. For reasons I did not learn for many years, Victor was receptive to my efforts to help him. In the beginning I would correct some of his mistakes, but eventually I became relentless correcting every mistake though I was careful to correct him only when we were alone. He was a quick study. I later learned that he spoke five dramatically different dialects of Chinese. In my experience I had witnessed foreigners who came to America who only gained enough knowledge of English to get by and even then, with a heavy foreign accent. I set it as a goal to help Victor reach a “near native” level of American English so that he was never shunned as so many foreigners are who speak broken English. Even with his brilliant mind and considerable language skills English was a challenge. Imagine for a moment learning to conjugate “to be” and “to go.” I was astonished to learn that in Mandarin the three tenses for go are go, go & go. Only in context will you know whether “go” is present, past or future tense in Mandarin. On a plane ride from Cleveland to Jacksonville two years after arriving in America, Victor chatted with a young woman for two hours. Upon deboarding she was astonished to learn that Victor was born & raised in China and was not American born. It was a high five moment for both of us.

Through the years Victor & I always kept in close touch. He visited my home in Daytona Beach a number of times during college years. Each of us was best man at the other’s weddings. During my family’s vacation trips to Maine each summer, we always spent a night with Victor, Stephanie and their family establishing close ties between all members of both families including Victor’s parents, such grand people. Along the way we attended both Tim & Cory’s weddings. Likewise, Victor & Steph attended our son’s wedding. While on business in Boston I always stayed with Victor & Steph, and he (they) did likewise when they were in the Washington, DC, area. Since retiring in Maine, Victor & Steph would visit us each summer. When I was diagnosed with cancer many years ago, Victor used his contacts to arrange the best medical care that Boston had to offer with me staying with Victor & Steph again & again. The medical treatment I had at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center saved my life. We have visited Victor & Steph three times at their lovely home on Kauai, perhaps better known as Paradise. We also have regular ZOOM calls.

Victor & Steph’s stellar professional accomplishments are well known to all of us, but it is still mind-bending to ponder what their work with speech recognition technology has done to our world and to realize that without automated speech recognition technology, the prospects for the artificial intelligence world would be severely limited.

Victor & I have both passed the eighty-year post on the road of life, and we know that the shadows of our lives are lengthening quickly. Words could never adequately express the gratitude and privilege that Sue Ann and I have had to count Victor and Steph as such dear & close friends for all these years and to have shared such strong bonds with so many members of their family, a blessing beyond measure. Our lives have been so deeply enriched by our close and abiding friendship. Little did I know at that long ago meeting at the University of Florida in 1965 would have led to such deep & abiding friendships that the Zue’s & Moore’s have shared. Such an honor!

Rob Moore
Lincolnville, Maine
June 25, 2026

Wayne Chen

Written by Avis Chen Boulter and Tim Chen.

In the late 1960’s, one of the highlights of my career was teaching and mentoring the most brilliant engineering student I had ever met. He was Victor Zue. Victor and I were both Chinese immigrants, who came to America for our education. He was from Sichuan, and I was from Suzhou. Victor received his BS & MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida in 1968 and 1969, respectively. While working together, I got to know him. He was well known and well regarded by many people in engineering and the Chinese community. After finishing his master’s, Victor moved to Boston to work on his doctorate in Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his ScD in 1976. Victor and I kept in touch. He occasionally sent us treats such as Peking duck or other delicacies from Boston by way of Daniel Yuan, a MIT student, who was from Gainesville. I proudly followed Victor’s career. As an academician, there is nothing more rewarding than watching a star such as Victor reach his potential and be a leader in his field. Victor and I remained colleagues and friends throughout my life.

Victor was a pioneering computer scientist whose foundational work in acoustic phonetics, speech recognition, and spoken language systems helped define the modern era of human-computer interaction. In 2011, he became the Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and headed the Spoken Language Systems Group. CSAIL is the world’s largest and perhaps the most influential computer science laboratory. He met and collaborated with Dr. Stephanie Seneff in the CSAIL and Spoken Language Systems Group. Victor and Stephanie married. He was MIT’s Delta Electronics Chair Professor in EECS. Dr. Zue is recognized as one of the leading figures and a trailblazer in spoken language interfaces, shaping global breakthrough standards and early conversational AI systems. His groundbreaking work was the basis for the development of voice recognition and command applications such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Victor won many awards including Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering (2004), Academician from the Academia Sinica Taiwan (2008), the Okawa Prize (2012), and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech & Audio Processing Award (2013).

Zue was one of the most distinguished academic protégés of one of the earliest Chinese-American engineering deans. Dean Chen was inducted posthumously into UF’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Hall of Fame in April of 2026. Victor could not attend the ceremony, but sent a kind message from his home in Hawaii, which was read at the event. He wrote:

It is so fitting that Prof. Wayne Chen should be receiving this honor of being inducted into the University of Florida Electrical and Computer Engineering Hall of Fame. I was very fortunate to have attended the University of Florida at a time when Prof. Chen was the department chair. Being, like me, a Chinese immigrant in the United States, he served as a role model for what I might hope to achieve some day. I always felt challenged to achieve the level of greatness in a leadership role that he exemplified. His strong belief that engineering research should focus on delivering practical solutions to global challenges guided me in the research goals I later sought to achieve.

Mahalo nui loa!

Victor