Apple hires CMU professor as director of AI research to smarten up Siri

Apple is making a visible push in the direction of AI today by hiring Carnegie Mellon University professor Ruslan Salakhutdinov for what appears to be a newly minted position: director of AI research. Salakhutdinov, who announced his new position on Twitter, works in the fields of deep learning and neural networks; he's published dozens of papers in the last couple of years alone. The topics he's worked on run the gamut, but the main thread is one of human-like understanding of various media: recognizing objects in images, actions in videos, and so on. We are looking for exceptional hands-on research scientists with a proven track record in a variety of machine learning methods; from the realms of deep learning, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, and computer perception. You will be joining a world-class, multidisciplinary team and will be participating in cutting-edge research in deep learning, machine intelligence, and artificial intelligence.