Apple employs their new Artificial Intelligence (AI) director Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a leading expert in the field. He is tasked to ensure that Siri and other related products will take advantage of all the relevant breakthroughs released by academic experts from AI research. He is scheduled to discuss his research for the MIT Technology Review conference at EmTech MIT 2016 to be held this week.
Salakhutdinov is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Machine Learning Department, working in the field of statistical machine learning. His research revolves around deep learning and a series of very large neural networks which allows the computer to learn and carry out complex tasks by absorbing extensive amounts of patterns and training examples. He intends to continue to work with CMU part time and may add more people on board the team of researchers to work with him at Apple.
According to CNET, this technology is called "unsupervised learning" which may be a huge feat to accomplish but given at least 42 papers on machine learning under his belt, Salakhutdinov leads the game that Apple aims to get into.
Salakhutdinov's front line work on machine-learning techniques could be a groundbreaking progress in AI technology which could then be used in many different areas such as natural processing of language, computer vision, and robotics. He mentioned the three areas where AI is progressing which are learning by repetition and positive reinforcement, better language comprehension, and enhancing ways for computers to learn from raw data.
Hiring Salakhutdinov's is Apple's attempt to be at par in the race with Google, Amazon, Facebook and other tech pioneers and perhaps surpass them in the recent progress in AI development and machine learning. It has been increasingly crucial for software to learn by itself when it comes to performing tasks and using techniques such as deep learning.
