eBay hires Jan Pedersen from Twitter to spearhead its AI efforts

The company announced that it has lured Jan Pedersen from Twitter as its new VP and chief scientist for AI, and he will soon lead the company's strategy across natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. He officially starts on February 20. Pedersen has a long and distinguished engineering career in the technology industry according to his LinkedIn profile, serving in various chief scientist roles at AltaVista, Yahoo, and Amazon's A9 before joining Microsoft in 2009. Then in January 2017, he announced he was joining Twitter as VP for data science, where he has spearheaded "Twitter's investment in machine learning infrastructure and data analytics" for the past 12 months. That he has left Twitter so soon may hint at broader problems at Twitter, which has lost a number of key executives in recent years, including COO Anthony Noto just a few weeks ago.