Google has poached Snapchat's Jia Li, one of the highest-ranking women at the company as its head of research, to lead its news Google Cloud Machine Learning group.
Li was touted as one of the two new leaders of the group during a press briefing at Google's San Francisco headquarters, according to Danny Sullivan of MarketingLand who posted a picture of the presentation. A Google spokesperson confirmed that Li would be joining the company full-time to co-lead the group with Fei-Fei Li.
At Snapchat (now known as Snap Inc.), Jia Li's research team was charged with developing new ways to innovate and surprise users within the app. For example, in April, the app took emojifying your life one step further when it made it easy to attach an emoji to an object (say a smiley face onto a cat) and then have that emoji stick with it as it moves around.
The moving emojis are just one example of Li's work. She is also well-known for her work in computer vision and had joined Snapchat in early 2015 after spending three years leading the Visual Computing and Learning Group at Yahoo Labs.
Snap Inc. declined to comment on her departure.
