Fusemachines Inc. Appoints Former IBM Watson Team Lead (Multimodal Group) as the Director of Artificial Intelligence Research

NEW YORK, Oct. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Fusemachines Inc. announced on Friday that it has appointed Dr. Steven J. Rennie as the Director of Artificial Intelligence Research. A former team lead for IBM Watson (Multimodal Group) and a veteran in speech recognition, Rennie's appointment furthers Fusemachines' mission of Democratizing AI — to put Artificial Intelligence in everyone's hands through education, software and services.

"With over 20 years of rich experience in research and development, Steve is the perfect candidate to lead our future initiatives," said Sameer Maskey, the CEO of Fusemachines. "As one of the leading experts in robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), multi-talker ASR, LVCSR and image captioning, Steve will help Fusemachines to stay on the forefront of technological innovation," said Maskey.

The transformative potential of AI for business has led to a major transformative potential of AI for business has led to a major talent shortage of engineers with the requisite knowledge and experience in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Fusemachines provides AI-as-a-Service to businesses who value the importance and potential of AI but struggle to find skilled AI engineers. Rennie's hiring will help the company build on its position as one of the most prominent AI services providers.

"My goal is very simple - to establish Fusemachines as a world-class research facility, and to leverage the expertise within Fusemachines as it fulfills its destiny and becomes a leader in providing AI-based solutions," stated Rennie.

Rennie will also be a valuable resource for the company's flagship AI Fellowship program, which provides selected scholars from underserved communities with mentorship and resources to develop advanced skills in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The program culminates in a Micromasters certificate from Columbia University. After successfully launching fellowships in Nepal and the Dominican Republic, Fusemachines is now laying the groundwork for a program in New York City.

Rennie joins Fusemachines from IBM, where he was the Team Lead for Watson Multimodal Group. He earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto with a specialization in speech recognition. He frequently speaks at industry conferences such as Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

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SOURCE Fusemachines Inc.