At its annual Google for India event in the capital of New Delhi today, the search giant announced it's opening an AI research center in Bangalore, led by scientist Dr. Manish Gupta, an ACM Fellow and Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT Bangalore. The center, called Google Research India, will focus on tools that can be used by government and private entities. The company wants to work with local talent in the field of machine learning, computer vision, languages, speech, systems, and several other related areas. Along with Gupta, Google has appointed Professor Milind Tambe from Harvard University as a director of AI for social good. The company said one set of people working at the center will focus on fundamental AI research by publishing papers and building a strong community in the country, while another group will work on big problems in fields like healthcare, and,education, and also apply their ideas to "make apps and services used by billions of people more helpful."

Samsung's SVP, head of global research Larry Heck, who joined the company from Google last November, says the new centers represent an acknowledgement that we're still in the early stages of AI, and there are some grand scientific challenges to be solved so that more people actually start using AI every day: "These challenges are going to need the top AI talent in the world to solve them, so what we recognized is that we need to go to where the talent is," says Heck. "Toronto is a world-leading center for research, specifically in deep learning and computer vision, and similarly are Moscow and Cambridge. These are the first three, but we'll be expanding and opening more." The three new centers join Samsung's existing AI-research labs in Seoul and Mountain View, CA. While it does represent a significant boost in the company's AI investment, don't expect the results to land in your new phone next year. Heck says the work at these centers will be tackling advanced research problems, far out in front to provide a path forward for Bixby and their other AI efforts.

People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with a Google logo, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014. BEIJING - "China is a rising country of AI work and research," said Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud, calling for enhanced AI cooperation between major countries. Li made the remarks in a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua at Google's Beijing office. Just last week, Li announced that Google would launch a new AI research center in Beijing, as part of its AI First strategy. When asked what prompted Google to make the decision to open its center in the Chinese capital, Li said: "We all recognize the importance of China because of its talent, because of the incredible creativity and innovation that are already going on here."