[argonaut]

I'm pretty sure Andrew Ng was hired by Baidu as a recruiting tool / evangelist. He hasn't done much research recently.

[nabla9]

If his job as a Chief Scientst at Baidu is similar to the Director of Research at Google (Peter Norvig) he is too busy to be part of individual research projects.

He is probably one of the guys who decides where the direction of company research is heading and the one who supervises those projects.

[tudorw]

A moment to champion the importance of a great evangelist, research is important, though without propagating the results and helping with 'real world's deployment, it might be effort wasted :)