Google has announced a partnership with Oxford University’s cutting edge Artificial Intelligence research teams to accelerate Google’s research efforts in image recognition and natural language understanding, among other areas.

Back at the start of the year Google purchased DeepMind, an AI research company, and has now hired additional researchers from two AI based start-up companies – the newly formed team at Dark Blue Labs and the co-founders of Vision Factory. Dark Blue Labs has been looking into intelligent product design involving language understanding, while Vision factory has done work in object and text recognition systems for mobile platforms.

Three of the seven new team members are professors at Oxford University, and will continue to spend part of their time there. Dr Simonyan and Prof Zisserman, co-founders of Vision Factory, developed one of the winning systems at the recent 2014 ImageNet competition, which is regarded as the most competitive and prestigious image recognition contest in the world.

As part of the collaboration, Google Deepmind will also be making a donation to establish a partnership with Oxford University’s’ Computer Science and the Engineering Departments. This also includes a program for student internships and a series of lectures and workshops.

Although Google is still keeping its exact AI research goals under wraps, it looks like computer learning and understanding of images and human interaction form an important part of its plans.