"Google Research, Europe, will foster an environment where software engineers and researchers specialising in ML will have the opportunity to develop products and conduct research right here in Europe, as part of the wider efforts at Google", said Google in a blog post.
Machine learning has become an area of increasing interest to technology companies in the a year ago. Researchers working at the company's existing engineering offices in Zurich have already made major contributions to the field, such as developing the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in the Allo smart messaging app, and developing the engine that powers Knowledge Graph.
Google also notes that it makes sense for it to have a research home in Europe, where many of the world’s top technical universities reside. This gives it access to researchers to build out its teams.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that this isn’t Google’s only investment in research in Europe in recent days. Via its German division, Google Germany, it invested in the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (the DFKI), last year. This nonprofit institute is home to 450 scientists, academics and others who work on things like language technology, embedded intelligence, augmented reality, knowledge management, and multimedia analysis and data mining.
Plus, Google spent over $500 million to buy an AI startup Deep Mind in the U.K. and invested in Oxford University’s AI research efforts, as well as its Venture Fund (via Google Ventures.)
During I/O, Google unveiled Google Assistant, a voice-based digital assistant designed the take on Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "Our ability to do conversational understanding is far ahead of what other assistants can do."
Now the creation of a facility dedicated to machine learning is also a signal to competitors like Facebook, which is also making a heavy investment in AI.
