Google and the UK's Oxford University are joining hands in the development of artificial intelligence with the help of the industry's top notch researchers.
Google, the world's largest internet search company, will soon gain assistance from some of the world's greatest researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The web search titan has teamed up with Oxford University to speed up its AI efforts, specifically in the image recognition and natural language fields. Google's recently-acquired DeepMind is putting the new partnership in motion by working with two AI research teams from Oxford.
In an official Google Europe Blog, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google, Demis Hassabis, said that natural language experts line Professor Nando de Freitas, Professor Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann will help Google in making machines much smarter and to better understand users' words. These professors were key players in founding Dark blue Labs, which specializes in making natural language understanding a reality.
Another team, including Dr Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Prof Andrew Zisserman, will join Google's DeepMind team to work on the visual recognition systems through deep learning. This team co-founded Vision Factory, a startup that masters the art of object and text recognition systems through deep learning.
"Google DeepMind has hired all seven founders of these startups with the three professors holding joint appointments at Oxford University where they will continue to spend part of their time," Hassabis wrote. "These exciting partnerships underline how committed Google DeepMind is to supporting the development of UK academia and the growth of strong scientific research labs."
Google will make a generous donation to establish a research partnership with the Computer Science Department and the Engineering Department at Oxford University. This will offer student internships, joint lectures and workshops.
