Chinese internet giant Tencent set up an artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in Seattle, Washington and appointed Dr. Yu Dong, an expert in speech recognition technology, as its deputy head on Tuesday.
Yu will also take charge of the operation and management of the new Seattle division, as well as leading basic research in speech recognition and natural language understanding.
The AI lab will develop AI in four directions including content, social contact, games and platform tools.
On March 23, Tencent appointed Zhang Tong to be the head of Tencent AI Lab. Zhang leads a team consisting of over 50 AI scientists and 200 AI application engineers to implement the study mainly in four vertical fields - computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning.
"We are very happy to have Dr. Yu in our AI lab," said Zhang.
Zhang also expressed hope that the lab can function as a connector of worldwide talent in AI.
Tencent AI Lab was established in April last year with its headquarter in Shenzhen. It provides AI technical support to Tencent products and services.
