• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2017

DeepMind, an Alphabet company that Google acquired in 2014, plans to build closer ties with academia in an effort to advance research and use of artificial intelligence (AI).

"This alignment with academia has always been important to us personally, given how many of our team come from that background, as well as the fact that many of the core ideas behind machine learning were invented and developed by academic pioneers including the likes of Geoff Hinton and Rich Sutton," wrote DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis, who explained the company's collaboration with academia to advance artificial intelligence in a blog post.

Starting this month, DeepMind will begin running a state-of-the-art Masters level training sessions called Advanced Topics in Machine Learning with University College London’s (UCL) Department of Computer Science.

Led by DeepMind’s Thore Graepel, other invited speakers include researchers in areas spanning deep learning, reinforcement learning, natural language understanding and others.

Hado van Hasselt, Joseph Modayil, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Raia Hadsell, James Martens, Oriol Vinyals, Simon Osindero, Ed Grefenstette and Karen Simonyan will be joined by Volodymyr Mnih, David Silver and Alex Graves, who are also some of the first authors of DeepMind’s three Nature papers.

Hassabis said the company has published about 100 peer-reviewed papers and regularly present at industry-wide gatherings such as NIPS, a conference and workshop on neural information processing systems held each December.

Last month in Barcelona, DeepMind published 20 papers, participated in 42 poster sessions, gave 21 talks, and open-sourced its flagship DeepMind Lab research platform, Hassabis wrote.

DeepMind in December also joined Microsoft and individuals like Elon Musk to participate in OpenAI, which would make their technology available to researchers and developers or anyone else wishing to use it.