Google wants to expand DeepMind's work so it has hired top notch experts in the field to help with the goal

Oct 23, 2014 11:53 GMT  ·  By

Google’s efforts to improve its Artificial Intelligence work are increasing as the company announced that it was going to make some more significant moves in this department.

After acquiring DeepMind earlier this year, paying a rumored $400 million (€292 million) for the secretive AI company based in London, Google is clear that it wants more.

“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. Today we are delighted to announce a partnership with Oxford University to accelerate Google’s research efforts in these areas,” reads a blog post signed by Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google.

The company will be working with two of Oxford’s cutting edge Artificial Intelligence research teams. Professors Nando de Freitas and Phil Blunsom, and doctors Edward Grefenstette and Karl Moritz Herman, who have been working on Dark Blue Labs, form one of the teams. They are “four world leading experts in the use of deep learning for natural language understanding,” as Google puts it.

At Google, they will be handling the efforts to enable machines to better understands what users are saying to them.

The second team is formed by Dr. Karen Simonyan, Max Jadenberg and Professor Andrew Zisserman, one of the first experts on computer vision systems and the only person to ever be awarded the Marr Prize three times. They have co-founded Vision Factory, a company that seeks to improve visual recognition systems with the help of deep learning.

All seven founders of these startups have been hired by Google DeepMind, while the professors in the group will continue to teach at Oxford, according to the deal. Google will be making, in turn, a substantial donation to establish a research partnership with the Computer Science Department and the Engineering Department at Oxford University. This will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops to share knowledge and expertise.

The natural step after buying DeepMind

The news doesn’t come as a surprise considering Google’s previous acquisitions. Ever since the company bought DeepMind, it was expected that they’d try to expand the team by hiring more experts to help out with the project. What is surprising, however, is the fact that Google didn’t just limit itself at low-level engineers, but went straight to the top, snatching founders, professors and doctors, the best at what they do.

It should be exciting to see where Google will take the AI research and what the company will do with all this. Considering that the company has also invested heavily in robotics in the past year, it seems like the two domains are tightly linked.

The fact that Google is dipping its fingers in yet another business doesn’t sit well with many people, but Google has the money and the power to make things happen.