Google has set up a new research group in Europe to focus on machine learning (ML), which is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to learn without being accurately programmed.
Google Research, Europe, will be based in Zurich, Switzerland, which is already home to the company’s largest research centre outside the US.
The centre will focus on the development of products and research in the areas of machine intelligence.
The team will research ways to enhance ML infrastructure as well as how to put it into practical use.
Researchers in the company’s Zurich office will also work with team linguists to advance Natural Language Understanding.
The centre will also focus on Machine Perception to address the problems of understanding images, sounds, music and video.
Google Research, Europe, head Emmanuel Mogenet said in a blogpost, "Europe is home to some of the world’s premier technical universities, making it an ideal place to build a top-notch research team.
"We look forward to collaborating with all the the excellent Computer Science research that is coming from the region, and hope to contribute towards the wider academic community through our publications and academic support."
Google said that its Zurich office is already home to a lot of activity in this area.
The team developed the engine for Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is used to improve the company’s search results with semantic-search data collected from a several sources.
A conversation engine was also developed at the Zurich office to powers the Google Assistant in Allo.
Last month, Google unveiled a custom chip to improve machine learning capabilities used by its own teams in various applications.
The new chip called as a Tensor Processing Unit, a custom application-specific integrated circuit, is built specifically for machine learning and tailored for TensorFlow.
