Google picks up two Oxford University startups for AI talent

Google boosts ranks of experts as it focuses on image recognition and natural language understanding

Google has bought two Oxford University artificial intelligence (AI) startups focused on image recognition and natural language understanding as the firm looks to boost its expertise in these areas.

Google's DeepMind division, formed from an acquisition of DeepMind at the start of the year, is spearheading this drive, which also sees the company form a partnership with Oxford University to develop more AI expertise.

DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, who is now Google's vice president of engineering, revealed in a blog post that the company has hired seven Oxford University AI experts from two startups to bolster its ranks and knowledge base.

The first four experts are Professor Nando de Freitas, Professor Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann. They have created their own AI startup called Dark Blue Labs.

The website for Dark Blue Labs states its aims as follows: 'Learning deep structured and unstructured representations of data to make intelligent products, including natural language understanding, a reality.'

The other three experts are Dr Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Prof Andrew Zisserman, who have formed Vision Factory which specialises in object and text recognition.

The three professors - de Freitas and Blunsom from Dark Blue Labs and Zisserman from Vision Factory - will continue to spend some of their time working and teaching at Oxford University.

Hassabis also revealed in the blog post that Google would make a "substantial donation" to the university as part of the partnership to develop more AI developments.

"[This will] 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," he wrote.

"It is a really exciting time for AI research these days, and progress is being made on many fronts including image recognition and natural language understanding."

The news comes hot on the heels of Google's announcement that it has acquired Firebase in a bid to improve how developers build and manage apps on its cloud platform that operate across different environments.