Google teams up with Oxford University to research AI

Following its acquisition of the secretive firm DeepMind, Google has allied with Oxford University to research artificial intelligence, ZD Net reported.

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google, wrote on the Google Europe Blog that the partnership would accelerate the firm's understanding of artificial intelligence, specifically within the image recognition and natural language fields.

The UK-based firm, DeepMind was acquired by Google in January this year, but not much was  known about the company aside from its specialisation in algorithms and machine-based learning protocols for e-commerce software, simulations and games. According to reports, the firm was purchased for $400 million (See: Google to buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind).

It is expected that that by partnering with Oxford University, a red-brick institution and one of the UK's top universities, research would be advanced at a quicker pace than relying purely on the DeepMind team.

The search company's DeepMind would be working with two of Oxford's artificial intelligence teams. Professors Nando de Freitas and Phil Blunsom, as also Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann, joined up last year to co-found Dark Blue Labs and were experts in "the use of deep learning for natural language understanding." The specialists would focus on "enabling machines to better understand what users are saying to them."

Google had expanded its artificial intelligence research team, acquiring two Oxford University spin-off companies specialising in machine learning and computer vision, The Guardian reported.

Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory and their seven key researchers will be added to Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence research company – another British artificial intelligence startup which the search giant acquired in January.

''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,'' wrote Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind.

Google's DeepMind was working on artificial intelligence similar what was seen in movies – a computer system that worked like a human brain, using information from its environment to make decisions free of human interaction.

Dark Blue Labs was focused on deep learning for understanding natural language, something Google's search products had been pioneering on a large scale with both typed and spoken natural language queries. The company's voice search was built into every Android smartphone and tablet, while desktop users could also search using voice through a web browser.

Prof Nando de Freitas, Prof Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann from Dark Blue Labs will focus on research to enable machines, be they computers or robots, to better understand what users said and what they were asking of them.