Google Partners with Oxford University to Develop Artificial Intelligence

Google has announced a partnership with leading research teams from Oxford University to further develop its artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

DeepMind, the UK-based AI company that Google acquired earlier this year, will work with Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory at the university to accelerate research efforts in image recognition and natural language understanding.

"They will be spearheading efforts to enable machines to better understand what users are saying to them," Dennis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, said in a statement. "Google DeepMind has hired all seven founders of these startups with the three professors holding joint appointments at Oxford University where they will continue to spend part of their 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."

A "substantial" donation to Oxford University will be made by Google DeepMind as part of the collaboration, which will help fund student internships as well as a series of lectures and workshops in the field.

AI Advances

Google's latest bid to boost its AI research capabilities comes just one month after announcing that it would be building quantum computing processors to expand AI technologies.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) team operating out of UC Santa Barbara aims to harness the vast potential of quantum computers in the field of AI.

The QAI team is expected to focus on creating AI capable of creativity, while DeepMind will work on "general" AI systems able to make independent decisions and predictions.

"It is a really exciting time for Artificial Intelligence research these days, and progress is being made on many fronts," Hassabis said.

"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."