Google, Oxford team up on AI

London: Technology giant Google is teaming up with Oxford University to advance research on artificial intelligence to ultimately enable machines to better understand human users.

The partnership will focus specifically on the fields of image recognition and natural language, Demis Hassabis, vice president of engineering at Google, wrote on the Google Europe Blog.

Hassabis is also the co-founder of DeepMind, a UK-based company that Google acquired in January.

Google DeepMind will be working with two of Oxford's cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) research teams. Google has also hired seven co-founders of the two artificial-intelligence groups, which had also formed startups, 'cnet.Com' reported.

Oxford professors Nando de Freitas and Phil Blunsom, as well as Edward Grefenstette and Karl Moritz Hermann, co-founded Dark Blue Labs last year and are experts in the use of deep learning for natural language understanding. The specialists will focus on enabling machines to better understand what users are saying to them.

Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman are the co-founders of Vision Factory, which focuses on improving visual recognition systems using deep learning.

As part of the collaboration, Google DeepMind will be making a substantial contribution to establish a research partnership with the computer science department and the engineering department at Oxford University, which will include a programme of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops to share knowledge and expertise, according to the blog post.