Research in artificial intelligence continues to grow with Google announcing that it is teaming up with Oxford University on Thursday to improve the technology.
Demis Hassabis, vice president of engineering at Google, said the partnership will have members of the search giant's DeepMind team working with two of the university's artificial intelligence groups to conduct research on image recognition and natural language, according to CNET.
U.K.-based DeepMind, which was bought by Google in January, was co-founded by Hassabis and specializes in algorithms and machine-based learning protocols for e-commerce software, games and simulations.
The two Oxford companies that will be working for/with Google are Dark Blue Labs, a startup that works on natural language understanding (how machines can learn what users say to them), and Vision Factory, which works to provide the best object recognition and text recognition systems, Engadget reported.
The goal for the research is to use "deep learning," an A.I. that copies biological neural networks, to improve speed and image recognition.
Dark Blue Labs was co-founded by Oxford professors Nando de Freitas and Phil Blunsom, along with Karl Moritz Hermann and Edward Grefenstette, CNET reported. Vision Factory was co-founded by Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman.
Google's role in the team-up will be to provide a "substantial" donation to create a research partnership with the Computer Science Department and the Engineering Department at Oxford. This partnership will include student internships, workshops and joint lectures.
Hassabis expressed his enthusiasm about the collaboration with Oxford, saying the Google DeepMind team is "excited about the potential impact of the advances their research will bring."
