Andrew Ng joins Baidu as chief scientist

Background

On 16 May 2014 US time, Baidu announced that it had appointed Andrew Ng as chief scientist, with overall charge of Baidu Research. The announcement was made at the opening ceremony of Baidu's new US research and development centre in Sunnyvale, California. Baidu said the new office would be the base of the newly formalised Silicon Valley AI Lab.^[1]

The appointment

Baidu described Ng as one of the most authoritative scholars in artificial intelligence and as a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. In the same announcement, the company set out the organisational link between the appointment and the new lab: the chief scientist would be in overall charge of Baidu Research, and the Sunnyvale office would house the Silicon Valley AI Lab. A chief scientist in this kind of role is a company-level research leadership position, covering a research organisation rather than a single product line.^[1]

Ng's background

Baidu said Ng had founded and led Google's deep learning team and was a co-founder of Coursera. After joining Baidu, he would continue as chairman of the Coursera board. The announcement listed his degrees as a BS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, an MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. It also said he had been named to Time's 100 most influential people and Fortune's 40 under 40 in 2013.^[1]

What the announcement records

The announcement brings together three elements in one statement: Ng's appointment as chief scientist, his overall charge of Baidu Research, and the formalisation of the Silicon Valley AI Lab at the Sunnyvale office. It also makes clear that his Coursera role would continue at board level. The document is therefore a record of how Baidu described the leadership and location of its AI research effort at that moment: a US-based lab, a formal research organisation, and a chief scientist placed in overall charge.^[1]