Siri is about to get a lot smarter thank to Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov, who announced today that he is joining Apple to lead the company's artificial intelligence efforts. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA Although he's not a household name, Russ Salakhutdinov is one of the biggest deep learning figures in academia. His hiring by Apple comes after the company has been criticized for Siri's weak performance compared to rival digital assistants from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Before working at CMU, Salakhutdinov worked at Toronto University and MIT.