Baidu Appoints Ng Chief Scientist, Opens Silicon Valley R&D Lab

Baidu has opened a research and development facility in Silicon Valley and announced the appointment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher Andrew Ng as chief scientist. He will lead Baidu Research, with labs in Beijing and Silicon Valley.

Ng, known in the artificial intelligence (AI) field, founded and led Google's Deep Learning team, and is known for his work on building massive artificial neural networks. He was named in 2013 to the Time 100, the list of "100 Most Influential People in the World," as well as to Fortune's "40 under 40" list.

Ng also works as a faculty member in computer science at Stanford University, where he teaches machine learning and has published on topics related to robotics and AI, and co-founded Coursera, which offers online courses from universities. He plans to retain his position as chairman of Coursera's board.

The search engine is based in China, where it holds the majority of market share accounts for roughly 8% of the global search media spend in the first quarter of 2014, 7% of all impressions, and 24% of all clicks, per Covario. The search agency said Baidu saw media spend growth on its search platform rise 4% year-over-year in the quarter.

The research labs under Baidu Research's umbrella are the Silicon Valley AI Lab; the Beijing Deep Learning Lab, which was formerly known as the Institute of Deep Learning that launched in 2013; and the Beijing Big Data Lab.

The Deep Learning Lab focuses on image recognition and image-based search, voice recognition, natural language processing and semantic intelligence, machine translation, and advertising matching, the foundation for Baidu's search engine in China, per the company.

Next story loading loading..