Google Swoops On Oxford AI Talent

Search giant Google's European Arm has formed a commercial partnership with Oxford University, with boffins delving into deepening our understanding of both image recognition and natural language understanding now joining Google as employees. 

The news was confirmed on the company's blog earlier this week, written by the former head (and now Google employee) of a UK AI (artificial intelligence) company the US outfit bought at the start of the year for a reported £240m, DeepMind.

Indeed that gentleman, Cambridge grad Demis Hassabis, who now has a title of VP Engineering, explains in his post the firm that the remaining DeepMind team will be the ones working with two of the ancient Uni's AI research groups, which had formed spin-offs that have now ben absorbed into DeepMind.

Those are a team that is looking into artificial vision and which looks for deep learning techniques as a way to boost their accuracy and another that uses the same approach to improve machine understanding of human language.

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Some of the academics involved are to join the DeepMind Google team, while some remain in post at the Uni, with Hassabis commenting, "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 part of the deal, Google will make a "substantial" donation to establish a research partnership with Oxford's Computer Science and Engineering Departments - money that will fund a number of student internships, joint lectures and workshops.

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