The University of Washington’s computer science department had to seek financial backing from e-commerce giant Amazon to lure artificial intelligence expert Carlos Guestrin from Carnegie Mellon University.
The Seattle-based company has spent $2 million funding two professorial ai experts, Gostrin and his wife, who also work in the field. In an effort to get it right, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said: “I’m not going to get it right. Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, also met with academic authorities in the field during a university visit.
“He was a smart guy who had a big laugh,” says Gostrin, now a professor of Amazon machine learning at the University of Washington. And of course we quickly got down to business, which was technical questions, what kind of work am I doing in large-scale machine learning, how can I make an impact on Amazon, what does AI mean for business data?”
As Google, Facebook, Amazon and others push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, tech companies are hiring big-name academics and promising PHDS
Tech giants are pouring money into universities that specialize in artificial intelligence (AI), a once-unpopular major. The University of Washington is known for its computer science, as well as its artificial intelligence program, and is based in the same state as Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft, Intel, Google and Amazon have all invested in ai research at the University of Washington.
That has made The university of Washington a battleground for silicon Valley tech companies in the battle for talent. Before Gostrin, who is best known for creating tools for ai developers, was hired by Amazon, Google had already lured seven ai professors from the University of Washington.
Pictured: Boxes on amazon’s delivery belt at the company’s logistics center in Tracy, California
Oren Etzioni, a former computer science professor at the University of Washington, said, “There’s a massive war for talent among the tech giants.” Mr. Etzioni is now working under Microsoft co-founder Paul Paul. Paul Allen heads a nonprofit artificial intelligence research institute in Seattle. “Basically every computer science professor at the University of Washington has been asked multiple times to join one of these tech companies, and frankly, those offers are very attractive,” he said.
These tech companies are not just courting big-name academic gurus, they are also wooing researchers with fresh doctorates. Amazon is hiring more than 50 doctoral candidates in machine learning and information science and statistics for its U.S. and European companies.
Last year Google bought DeepMind, a start-up founded by Cambridge university graduates. Following Google’s agreement, DeepMind bought two subsidiaries from Oxford University specialising in artificial intelligence. In exchange, Google agreed to collaborate with Oxford University on a computer science project.
Google and Amazon declined to comment on their ai ambitions.
Artificial intelligence is a broad academic field that aims to give computers human-like judgment based on data analysis, with more targeted disciplines such as machine learning and other sub-categories.
Commercial applications of ARTIFICIAL intelligence are still limited. Smart text input and Siri, the voice recognition feature in the iPhone, are just the beginning of ai in information technology. As the cost of computing falls and the ability to collect and process data increases, the potential for artificial intelligence is limitless. Technology giants such as Facebook and Google are sponging up vast amounts of data to boost machines’ autonomous decision-making.
Giiso, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, Giiso’s research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
Akri Beardsley, founder and chief executive of Brighterion, a software company, said: “Brighterion is a company with a lot of companies. “Ai is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now.” Brighterion is using machine learning to help credit card users spot financial fraud.
“The potential value of AI research work is so high that tech companies like Google are keeping their AI progress quiet.”
At Carnegie Mellon university, The head of the school of Computer Science, the machine learning department, said: “Says Tom Mitchell, the economist.
Microsoft is working on how machines understand context in human interactions. The software giant has been granted a patent for internet-enabled smart glasses that can detect and translate human emotion in real time in the field of vision and feed back to the user. The patent was filed in October 2012 and Microsoft only recently acquired the patent.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said: “It’s a good idea. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, mentioned machine learning last week when he talked about what is now at the heart of the company’s work. He talked about Google’s current advances in image and speech recognition. Siri, Apple’s built-in voice-search technology for its smartphones and tablets, suffers from all of these.
The relationship between tech giants and academia has always been tricky. Some academics complain that tech companies are not working hard enough on collaborative research projects. The paradox is that tech companies are unwilling to share the vast amount of data they can collect.
But there are those who support the relationship between business and academia, who believe that science and technology can be advanced through practical, real-world incentives. “I think it’s a good idea to have a computer science program at the University of Washington. Hank Levy, co-founder of Google, says he does not resent Google poaching talent from schools. “These people usually come back after a year or two and bring new experiences that have never been there before, which is very helpful in improving teaching and research capabilities,” he says.
Figure: The trend chart of the world famous academic ai giants
In late 2013, Facebook hired One of the most prominent people in artificial intelligence, Ian McGrath, from New York University. Yann LeCun is in charge of the company’s A.I. program. Lecun worked as an engineer at AT&T in the 1980s and 1990s, where he helped develop handwriting processing technology that is now widely used by banks.
As a gesture of good faith, Facebook allowed Lecun to retain his teaching position at NYU and return to the university part-time to teach and research
The campus is just across Broadway from Facebook’s headquarters. Facebook has also partnered with universities to set up research centres focused on data science, a key component of ARTIFICIAL intelligence. Facebook scientists can teach at NYU, while NYU doctoral students can intern at Facebook’s ARTIFICIAL intelligence lab, which is a good example of the interaction between business and academia.