Google recently acquired the University of Toronto start-up company DNNresearch Inc., the brainchild of computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and his graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever.
The start-up’s research focuses on deep neural networks that are capable of developing digital speech recognition. Under their new arrangement with Google, the DNNresearch Inc. team will split their time between Google’s Mountain View, California-based headquarters and Toronto.
Google had previously invested $600,000 into the start-up’s research, though the details of the new deal were not released.
“The deal with Google allows me and my students to work on whatever we like and to publish whenever and whatever we like … It doesn’t put any constraints on what we work on and when we publish,” said Hinton in an interview with the Toronto Star.
Google currently uses deep learning as part of the Android 4.1’s speech recognition, an area that is to be further developed by this University of Toronto team.
With files from the Toronto Star
