Why Google's newest AI team is setting up in Canada

DeepMind, Google's London-based artificial intelligence research branch, is launching a team at the University of Alberta in Canada. DeepMind is launching a team at the university partly for proximity to the broader AI research community in Canada. A number of leading AI researchers in Silicon Valley hail from Canada, where they plugged away at deep learning, a complex automated process of data analysis, during a period when that technology -- now popular at major tech companies -- was considered by the larger computer science community to be a dead end. Plus, almost a dozen DeepMind staff came from the university, according to a blog post by DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis announcing the new lab. An Alberta PhD and a former post doc from the school played key roles in one of DeepMind's hallmark accomplishments, getting its AlphaGo software to beat the human world champion at Chinese strategy game Go. "Our hope is that this collaboration will help turbocharge Edmonton's growth as a technology and research hub," wrote Hassabis, "attracting even more world-class AI researchers to the region and helping to keep them there too."