Facebook's Quest to Build an Artificial Brain Depends on This Guy

Mark Zuckerberg recently handpicked the longtime NYU professor to run Facebook's new artificial intelligence lab. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society just gave him its prestigious Neural Network Pioneer Award, in honor of his work on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence meant to more closely mimic the human brain. And, perhaps most of all, deep learning has suddenly spread across the commercial tech world, from Google to Microsoft to Baidu to Twitter, just a few years after most AI researchers openly scoffed at it. All of these tech companies are now exploring a particular type of deep learning called convolutional neural networks, aiming to build web services that can do things like automatically understand natural language and recognize images. At China's Baidu, they drive a new visual search engine.