To further its push into artificial intelligence, Google has recruited more bright brains to its DeepMind team and the search engine company has paid Oxford University to keep up research into the sector.
Google announced that its recently acquired DeepMind group will be working with two Oxford University teams to continue research into artificial intelligence.
"It is a really exciting time for Artificial Intelligence research these days, and progress is being made on many fronts, including image recognition and natural language understanding," states Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google.
Google is said to have picked up startup DeepMind for $400 million in January. With Hassabis' latest announcement, the DeepMind team welcomes seven new hires from Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory.
Dark Blue Labs was launched to research natural language learning, while Vision Factory was started with the goal to improve and refine visual recognition technology.
Of the new hires, three are professors at Oxford, and Google intends to see that they continue working there.
The search engine company has paid, or gifted, an undisclosed sum to Oxford's computer science and engineering departments to ensure that the university can continue its research into artificial intelligence. The three Oxford professors will continue working for the university part time.
"These exciting partnerships underline how committed Google DeepMind is to supporting the development of UK academia and the growth of strong scientific research labs," states Hassabis. "We are thrilled to welcome these extremely talented machine learning researchers to the Google DeepMind team and are excited about the potential impact of the advances their research will bring."
As Google works on the foundation for future tech and researches ways to make its existing products better, Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, says the fleshing out of DeepMind will benefit a variety of the Android maker's innovations.
"AI can be used to make applications more predictive, as well as make robots smarter," says Kerravala. "Well, it's most directly about robotics, but the intelligence can be ported to other applications. It could help anticipate user needs. AI could help apps figure out what users might do based on their past actions."
A month earlier, Google revealed a partnership with University of California Santa Barbara physicist John Martinis in which researchers continued the quest of turning the black art of quantum computing into something that yields tangible results.
