Facebook Poaches Talent From Google
Facebook has hired Google's leading executive, Regina Dugan, to head Building 8
Facebook established a research lab to build hardware products and appointed a leading Google official to head the effort, laying emphasis upon the broadening tech ambitions of the American social network.
Regina Dugan, a former research chief of Pentagon who joined Google in 2012, will head the new group, known as Building 8. It will develop hardware products that “advance mission of connecting the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his social network on Wednesday.
The company will invest “hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort over the next few years,” he told. The group will launch a decade-long strategic plan discussed by Mark at annual F8 developer conference recently, including progresses in virtual and extended reality, artificial intelligence, and expanding internet access to a large number of people across the world, the chief technology officer of Facebook, Mike Schrieffer spoke during an interview.
California Institute of Technology awarded Doctorate in mechanical engineering to Regina. She proved to be first lady to head the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research laboratory of Pentagon, where she worked from 2009 to 2012.
Later on, she was hired by Motorola, than a Google division, and established Advanced Technology and Projects of Google, a research laboratory for introducing aspiring new products. Regina’s team at Alphabet is effectively Google’s short-term skunk-works laboratory with a limit of two years on majority of its ventures.
This is not like X, a division of Alphabet working on long-term projects, like delivery drones and driver-less vehicles. In 2015, Regina’s lab at Google had around 1000 non-employee subject and 100 workers building on different ventures, including modular smartphones, technology enabling mobile products to effectively “see” in 3 dimensions and sensor-embedded clothing. Google’s 3-D sensing tech system, known as Project Tango, is launched in some of the smartphones in 2015.
Regina is the recent high-profile defection from Google to the social network company. In 2015, the Menlo Park based organization appointed Mary Lou Jepsen, who used to work as a senior executive at Google’s advanced-projects lab to develop Oculus. She has a background in display technology.
At Building 8, a group named after number of alphabets in the name of the social platform, Dr. Regina will develop new hardware devices that combine digital and physical worlds, the organization said.
Mark told Building 8 would let other teams of the company collaborate on long-term ventures including its Oculus VR unit and AI research lab, which started delivering its new VR headset recently.
