Man Behind the 'Google Brain' Joins Chinese Search Giant Baidu

Andrew Ng is the man who helped launch Google's wildly ambitious effort to recreate the human brain with computer hardware and software. And now, he will oversee a similar project at Baidu, often called "the Google of China." Last year, in Cupertino, California, not far from Apple headquarters, Baidu quietly opened a research outpost dedicated to "deep learning"–a subfield of artificial intelligence that seeks to vastly improve computing tasks by mimicking the way the human brain operates–and in the months since, this operation has expanded in significant ways. Today, the Chinese search giant will announce that the lab has graduated to a much larger space in Sunnyvale and that Ng, a Stanford University professor, will oversee a new Baidu artificial intelligence research group that spans this lab and an operation in China. "Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning, and deep learning in particular," says Bruno Olshausen, the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.