Google has just announced a partnership with Oxford University for conducting research on artificial intelligence.
The alliance, which aims to advance knowledge in image recognition and natural language understanding, comes months after Google acquired Deepmind, a secretive start-up based in the UK. There's not much that is known about the firm other than the field it operates in, which is algorithms and machine-based learning protocols for simulations, games and e-commerce software.
The partnership merges the Google Deepmind team with two research teams from Oxford that specialize in artificial intelligence. The natural language learning segment of the research will be headed by experts Prof. Nando de Freitas, Prof. Phil Blunsom, Dr. Karl Moritz Hermann and Dr. Edward Grefenstette. The four had earlier collaborated on establishing Dark Blue Labs.
For the image recognition part of the research, Deepmind will join forces with Prof. Andrew Zisserman, Dr. Karen Simonyan and Max Jaderberg, the trio behind Vision Factory, which specializes in visual recognition systems.
"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," Demis Hassabis, Deepmind co-founder and Google Vice President of Engineering, wrote in a blog post.
"These exciting partnerships underline how committed Google DeepMind is to supporting the development of UK academia and the growth of strong scientific research labs."
As part of the deal, Deepmind will make a donation that would go towards establishing a research partnership with Oxford University's computer science and engineering departments. The endowment would also be used to fund a student internship program and a series of workshops and joint lectures.
Google acquired Deepmind late last January. The exact acquisition price was not disclosed, but some reports estimated that it was over $500 million. There were also rumors that Facebook tried to acquire Deepmind last year.
Even now, it's still not clear what Google aims to accomplish with its acquisition of Deepmind. What is evident is that the company is collecting artificial intelligence experts. Aside from the Deepmind team and the Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory experts, Facebook has earlier hired inventor and author Ray Kurzweil as a director of engineering for language processing and machine learning.
