It was just announced that Eric Horvitz, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and current Co-Chair of the AI and Robotics Task Force, is the new head of Microsoft Research. Yesterday, it was announced that Jeannette Wing was leaving to lead Columbia’s Data Science Institute.

Horvitz has long been a leading voice in AI safety and ethics. Recently, he announced the new Partnership on AI that consists of a consortium including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. The goal of the partnership is to bring industry together to talk about the use of AI for humanity’s benefit.

From Quartz:

Horvitz wants to fundamentally change the way humans interact with machines, whether that’s building a new way for AI to fly a coworker’s plane or designing a virtual personal assistant that lives outside his office. He will get a chance to further his influence, with his appointment yesterday as head of all of Microsoft’s research centers outside Asia.

In his new role, Horvitz will harness AI expertise from each lab—in Redmond, Washington; Bangalore, India; New York City, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Cambridge, England—into core Microsoft products, as well as setting up a dedicated AI initiative within Redmond. He also plans to make Microsoft Research a place that studies the societal and social influences of AI. The work he plans to do, he says, will be “game-changing.”

Congrats, Eric!