In an effort to "boost its voice and image search technology," Google has acquired Toronto startup DNNresearch, a small company founded by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his grad students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever.
The financial details were not disclosed, but the news comes following the $600,000 gift provided through Google's Focused Research Awards Programs last year, TechCrunch reports. Much of the discussion is based not just on DNNresearch's research into voice recognition technology and deep neural networks, but also on Google's desire to acquire the talent. Krizhevsky and Sutskever developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art of object recognition" and will move to Google. Hinton will "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google," continuing to work part time at UoT and partially out of Google's Toronto office, as well as the company's headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
TechCrunch summarizes Hinton's many accomplishments, noting he "is the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College in London, holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and is the director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research-funded program on 'Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception.' Also a fellow of The Royal Society, Professor Hinton has become renowned for his work on neural nets and his research into “unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input," the article says.
It also notes that the University of Toronto
said the team's research "has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding." Professor Hinton predicted in a Google+ post that "Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs."
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Original Source: TechCrunch