Wired reports on Google’s acquisition of DNNresearch, Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto spinoff, quoting UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska:
“‘Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,’ said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. In an email interview, he said that a pretty spectacular December 2012 live demonstration of instant English-to-Chinese voice recognition and translation by Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid was ‘one of many things made possible by Hinton’s work.'”
Read the Wired article here. It includes a video of Rashid’s amazing demo.