Google has acquired a University of Toronto startup to improve its speech and object recognition research, the university announced this week. DNNresearch, incorporated in 2012 by computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, focuses on speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding. It has developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition," according to the university's media release. The three-person team also received a $600,000 grant earlier from Google's Focused Research Awards, which support research in computer science and engineering. The announcement makes DNNresearch the 9th Canadian company acquired by the search giant.