The Researcher Who Wants to Bring AI to Factories

Gargantuan Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million people and tens of thousands of robots making iPhones and other electronics. It has a reputation for cost cutting, including at the expense of its workers. Now, it's teaming up with an artificial-intelligence researcher who helped trigger Google's reorientation around machine learning in order to make its own factories more efficient. Andrew Ng was a Stanford professor when he joined Google in 2011 to work on a project that created software able to recognize cats--and a new corporate emphasis on AI at Google. He later led AI research at Chinese search engine Baidu.