Google this week acquired Canadian neural networks startup DNNresearch, a three-man team working out of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but all three will be working for Google as well as continuing their research at the university. DNNresearch was incorporated last year by university professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Google doesn’t appear to have gained any actual product or service, just talent, leading us to believe this is more of an “acqui-hire” – where the employees are what’s really being bought. Hinton will split his time between Google’s Toronto office, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, and continue on with his university research. Krizhevsky and Sutskever have also been hired by Google but will also be continuing their research under academic freedom. The University of Toronto says Hinton is world-renowned for his work with neural networks, research that can be particularly useful in Computer Science areas such as speech recognition, computer vision, and language understanding. All three of those are interesting to Google, especially in the mobile space as it pushes forward with the likes of Android and Glass. Neural networks can be used to give context for human language to machines. As more people move towards mobile devices and want to search with their voice, such resear
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