Google has bought a three-person Canadian startup, DNNresearch, based in Toronto, TechVibes reports.
The "DNN" in its name stands for "deep neural networks." That's a contemporary approach to designing artificially intelligent systems which requires less work to "train" the systems.
Google archrival Microsoft has already rolled out deep-neural-network technology in some of its audio- and video-indexing systems.
DNNresearch is led by Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto who will split time between the university and Google's Toronto office and Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Two of Hinton’s graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, will relocate to California. Google had previously backed their research with a $600,000 grant, TechVibes reports.
Where their technology, which delivers improved recognition of nearby objects and images, could come in handy is with Google Glass, the experimental Internet-connected headset, and Google Now, Google's predictive-assistance technology which attempts to deliver answers without forcing users to enter queries.
In other words, Google's already pretty smart—but deep-neural-network techniques could make it far, far smarter.
