Google buys University of Toronto startup

Google has acquired a University of Toronto startup to improve its speech andobject recognition research, the university announced this week.

DNNresearch, incorporated in 2012 by computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, focuses on speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding.It hasdeveloped a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition," according to the university's media release.

The three-person team also received a $600,000 grant earlier from Google's Focused Research Awards, whichsupport research in computer science and engineering.

The announcement makes DNNresearch the 9th Canadian companyacquired by the search giant.

"I am extremely excited about this fantastic opportunity to keep my research here in Toronto and, at the same time, help Google apply new developments in deep learning to make systems that help people,"Hinton saidinthe media release.

• Read about Geoffrey Hinton's award-winning research on machine learning
• Geoffrey Hinton discusses artificial intelligence on Quirks & Quarks

Nowa part-time Google employee, Hinton will divide his time between university research and his work at Google. Krizhevsky and Sutskever will also be moving to the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Hinton's researchinterestsare focusedonusing deep neural networks collections of brain cells to explore learning, memory, perception, and image processing.

In addition to his position at U of T, Hinton is alsothe Canada Research Chair in machine learning and the founding member of Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.