Baidu research chief Andrew Ng fixed on self-taught computers, self-driving cars

Career: Baidu, chief scientist, May 2014 to present; co-founder and chairman of Coursera, 2012; Google Brain, project founder and leader, 2011-2012; Stanford University, faculty member since 2002. Ng developed some of the underpinnings of "deep learning," a computer-programming technique that uses powerful neural networks of processors to imitate some of the human brain's functions. The Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab's speech-recognition system, Deep Speech, was named as a "breakthrough" technology by MIT Tech Review in February. A: Yes, our search system is powered by deep learning, but a lot of things at Baidu are powered by deep learning.