Google is partnering with Oxford University to accelerate Google’s research efforts in Artificial Intelligence areas. Google DeepMind will be working with two Artificial Intelligence research teams. Prof Nando de Freitas, Prof Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann, who teamed up earlier this year to co-found Dark Blue Labs, are four experts in the use of deep learning for natural language understanding. They will be spearheading efforts to enable machines to better understand what users are saying to them.

Google acquired DeepMind in January with a view to putting the company’s expertise and research towards its own advanced robotic intentions.

Also joining the DeepMind team will be Dr Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Prof Andrew Zisserman, one of the world’s foremost experts on computer vision systems, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the only person to have been awarded the Marr Prize three times. As co-founders of Vision Factory, their aim was to improve visual recognition systems using deep learning.

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.

As a part of the collaboration, Google DeepMind will be making a donation to establish a research partnership with the Computer Science Department and the Engineering Department at Oxford University, which will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops.