Google’s AI lab establishes first international office in Canada

DeepMind

Even after Google acquired artificial intelligence firm DeepMind three years ago, the British company has kept its offices in London. This time, though, they’re finally making their way to this side of the world and putting up shop right in Edmonton. It’s fitting for DeepMind to put its roots here as the company works closely with the AI research community at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. DeepMind says nearly a dozen of Alberta grads work for them and they sponsored the university’s machine learning lab for a number of years.

DeepMind’s new office will be led by Richard Sutton, a professor of computing science at Alberta who also served as DeepMind’s first outside advisor. He’ll be working with his colleagues Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski. There will be seven other researchers who’ll join them. The Verge points out though that while DeepMind calls the Edmonton office its “first international research office,” there are a team of researchers from the company that are based in Google’s Mountain View headquarters to “bridge the gap between Google and [the] team in London.” And these 20 researchers focus on the “applied” side of DeepMind, which looks at the practical applications of AI in real-life situations.