Apple adds Carnegie Mellon prof to aid AI research

Apple is adding a professor at Carnegie Mellon as a director of artificial intelligence research as the company continues with a hiring spree in machine learning.

In a tweet, Russ Salakhutdinov, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, said he was joining Apple to lead an AI research team and encouraged folks to apply.

According to his bio "primary interests lie in deep learning, machine learning, and large-scale optimization. His main research goal is to understand the computational and statistical principles required for discovering structure in large amounts of data."

Salakhutdinov also indicated that Google Research, Microsoft Research, Samsung, DARPA, and Raytheon BBN have all been funding sources for his research.

The tweet from Salakhutdinov indicated that he will continue as an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon. With Google touting its machine learning and AI knowhow across hardware and software, Apple has attempted a hiring spree of sorts. A search on Apple's job board indicates that there are 129 positions open revolving around machine learning.

Many of those positions were posted in recent months.