Alibaba Snatches Facebook’s Former AI Scientist Jia to Develop Big Data Platforms

LIAO SHUMIN

(Yicai Global) March 19 — Jia Yangqing, a former artificial intelligence expert for Facebook, has joined Alibaba Group Holding as the vice president of engineering.

Jia will lead research and development on big data computing platforms, the Hangzhou-based tech giant’s artificial intelligence lab Alibaba Damo Academy said on its official account on Quora-like Zhihu platform.

The Tsinghua University graduate joined Facebook three years ago as a director involved in developing the California-based firm’s solutions for computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and augmented reality. Before that, he served Google’s deep learning team Google Brain as a research scientist.

Editor: Emmi Laine