DeepMind Goes to Alberta For First International Lab

DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company, is hiring three prominent computer scientists from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to establish its first research facility outside the U.K.

The new lab will be headed by Rich Sutton, a leading expert in reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning in which software learns by trial and error to maximize a reward. The company is also hiring Michael Bowling, a professor who has used reinforcement learning to train software capable of playing poker better than many of the world’s top professionals, and Patrick Pilarski, who has studied the creation of AI-enabled artificial limbs.

As the race to develop ever more advanced machine learning capabilities accelerates, wealthy tech companies from Facebook to Uber have increasingly raided university computer science departments to gain an edge on rivals, a trend that troubles some academics who fear the brain drain is making it harder to train the next generation of researchers.