Google Boosting its AI Research in Tokyo

Google is looking to expand its AI research activities in the Japanese capital. The company’s deep learning and AI research team Google Brain yesterday posted a Tokyo job listing seeking talented experts to participate in cutting edge research on machine learning.

Applicants will work on real-world problems involving AI, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more.

Minimum qualifications for the position are:

－PhD in Computer Science, related technical field or equivalent practical experience.

－Experience contributing to research communities and/or efforts, including publishing papers in Machine Learning venues (e.g: JMLR, ICLR, NIPS, ICML, ACL and CVPR).

－Experience in Natural Language Understanding, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Algorithmic Foundations of Optimization, Data Mining or Machine Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence).

－Programming experience in one or more of the following: C, C++ and/or Python.

Google Chief of AI division and Head of Google Brain Jeff Dean tweeted, “Happy to see our #GoogleAI efforts expanding with Google Brain now having a research presence in Tokyo.”

Google Brain was initiated in 2011 as “Google X,” a project focused on building a large-scale deep learning software system. Its founding members — Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng — successfully built a neural network powered by 16,000 computer processors, which was trained to recognize cats in YouTube videos. The project ended up doing so well that it was upgraded into “Google Brain” with a mission to improve people’s lives by making machines smarter. Google Brain has since attracted top-tier researchers such as Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, who developed back propagation; and Ian Goodfellow, who created generative adversarial networks (GANs).

Google Brain is aggressively pursuing AI talents outside the US. In 2016, Google opened a Zurich research unit focused on machine learning, the digital assistant inside its Allo Chat app, autonomous driving efforts, and improvements to Google’s search engine.

Google opened its first office in Japan back in 2001. Headquartered in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills complex, Google Japan has since grown to a team of over 1,300.

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Journalist: Tony Peng| Editor: Michael Sarazen

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