Following in the footsteps of Bob Metcalfe, 3Com co-founder and co-inventor of Ethernet, and most recently Ash Carter, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Alphabet’s former executive chairman (Google’s parent company) Eric Schmidt joins the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a visiting innovation fellow. For the coming year, beginning this spring, Schmidt will help advance MIT’s machine and human intelligence research, advising on the recently launched MIT Intelligence Quest which explores difficult challenges facing those technology areas.
Schmidt spoke about his plans in a press release, saying that, “I have spent much of my career building corporations that could scale. AI represents the next great scalability platform. Think of a platform of knowledge about everything. If you can’t use that to make the world a better place, you’re not paying attention.”
He was appointed as Alphabet’s executive chairman in 2015, and remains an Alphabet technical advisor and board member despite resigning from the chairman role in January. Schmidt holds advanced degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, studied electrical engineering at Princeton University, and further advanced his software skills at California’s Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
As a visiting innovation fellow, Schmidt will work directly with MIT scholars and explore the processes necessary to take innovation past invention in order to solve global-scale problems.
