Apple planning to ramp up machine learning, hires AI researcher from Carnegie Mellon

Whether we believe it or not, there is a shift in the pattern of tech companies as they adopt newer technologies with open arms. Artificial Intelligence, seems to be on the agenda of most of these companies, be it Microsoft, Google, Facebook or even Apple. To ramp up AI, Apple has made a prominent hire of a AI researcher from Carnegie Mellon University - Russ Salakhutdinov.The announcement came from Salakhutdinov via Twitter. This role will be in addition to his work at  CMU. Interestingly, he seems to be building a team to strengthen AI at Apple and even tweeted out a job application form for those interested.https://twitter.com/rsalakhu/status/788041946325479424The job listing mentions Apple is looking for scientists with experience in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Optimization, and/or Data Mining.Prior to Carnegie Mellon, Salakhutdinov was with the University of Toronto and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to Bloomberg. Moreover, his research work was funded by Google, Microsoft and Samsung.This doesn't come as a surprise as Apple has made multiple AI-related startup acquisitions in the past few months. The most recent was Tuplejump, a Hyderabad-based machine learning startup. It had also acquired  Turi and Emotient.