The University of Toronto reports Tuesday that Google has acquired a “ground-breaking” start-up out of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Research startup DNNresearch is now in the Google family, which isn’t difficult to understand when you consider that the Internet search giant recently awarded the firm’s three founders with $600,000 for their impressive work in neural networks and language and image processing.
University Professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, incorporated DNNresearch Inc. just last year.
“Geoffrey Hinton’s research is a magnificent example of disruptive innovation with roots in basic research,” said U of T’s president, Professor David Naylor. “The discoveries of brilliant researchers, guided freely by their expertise, curiosity, and intuition, lead eventually to practical applications no one could have imagined, much less requisitioned… I extend my congratulations to Professor Hinton for this latest achievement.”
Google has confirmed the acquisition although no terms of the deal have been made public as of this writing.
According to details emerging from today’s announcement, Krizhevsky and Sutskever will focus full-time on Google while Hinton juggles research projects at the University of Toronto and at Google.
“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 stated earlier today.
