Microsoft has a new expert leading research at one of its hotbeds for artifical intelligence.
Geoffrey Gordon is the new research director for the Microsoft Research Lab facility in Montreal, which is the company’s largest focusing on natural language processing and its role in artificial intelligence settings.
Gordon is a professor focusing on artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University, with research interests including reinforcement learning – teaching systems through trial and error – and statistical models of difficult data.
“We want to be doing the research that will be infusing AI into Microsoft products today and tomorrow, and Geoff’s research really spans that,” said Jennifer Chayes, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research in New England, New York City and Montreal. “He’ll be able to help us improve our products and he’ll also be laying the foundation for AI to do much more than is possible today.”
Chayes adds that Gordon’s expertise in reinforcement learning, robotics and natural language processing give him a background that “will be key to developing sophisticated AI systems in the future.”
According to a blog post announcing the hiring, Microsoft says it plans to double the size of its team researching AI in Montreal to 75 experts over the next two years. The company established the lab in 2017 with the acquisition of Maluuba.
