Over the past year, Google AI has opened a number of research facilities around the world. The latest will be a lab at Princeton University to foster collaboration with the academic community.
Google’s latest academic partnership involves a new lab opening early next year in the New Jersey college town. It will be located right across the street from Princeton University’s Nassau Hall.
By fostering closer collaborations with faculty and students at Princeton, the lab aims to broaden research in multiple facets of machine learning, focusing its initial research efforts on optimization methods for large-scale machine learning, control theory and reinforcement learning.
The existing research team joined Google earlier this year and has been working remotely from the Google NYC offices and the Princeton campus. In the coming weeks, they will move into the new Google space.
Partnerships with academia often work to advance research and lead to “novel developments in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields.” At Princeton, Google is already working on Large-Scale Optimization and Reinforcement Learning.
Another broad mission of Google’s research group in Princeton is to develop principled building blocks for decision-making systems. In particular, the group strives to leverage provable guarantees from the field of online learning, which studies the robust (worst-case) guarantees of decision-making algorithms under uncertainty.
In June, Google opened an AI Center in Ghana, with the China Center opening late last year. Other teams are of course housed in the Googleplex, New York, London, Zurich, Toronto, and Tokyo, while Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind has offices in London, Paris, and Toronto.