Apple Hires Carnegie Mellon AI Academic to Push Machine Learning

Apple Inc. hired a prominent artificial intelligence researcher from Carnegie Mellon University as it seeks to regain lost ground against competitors such as Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com He posted a link to an Apple job application page seeking machine learning specialists. Apple is seeking scientists with "experience in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Optimization, and/or Data Mining," it said in the job listing. Machine learning has gained mounting importance for tech companies to improve their research and enable virtual assistants such as Siri to better anticipate and predict users' needs. Siri is competing with the Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa to become the virtual assistant of choice and the access point for users seeking online services.