John Martinis and his team at UC Santa Barbara has joined the Quantum Artifical Intelligence team at Google in a hardware initiative to design and build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics. With an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture. Google will continue to collaborate with D-Wave scientists and to experiment with the "Vesuvius" machine at NASA Ames which will be upgraded to a 1000 qubit "Washington" processor.

Yang Li is a Google Senior Research Scientist in Human Computer Interaction and Mobile Computing, and an affiliate faculty member in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Yang's research focuses on novel tools and methods for creating mobile interaction behaviors, particularly regarding emergent input modalities, cross-device interaction and predictive user interfaces. Yang wrote Gesture Search, an Android app for access of mobile content using gestures. Yang develops software tool support and recognition methods, leveraging techniques such as machine learning, computer vision and crowdsourcing to make complex tasks simple.

In December, Montreal will host the 2014 Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2014), the premier forum for the exchange of research on the many facets of neural information processing and machine learning. NIPS draws upon a combined view of biological, physical, mathematical, and computational sciences and their application to computer vision, information theory, statistical linguistics, cognitive science, and more. As a sponsor of NIPS 2014, Google looks forward to being part of the discussions and latest research. If you are attending, stop by the Google booth for demos, and chat with the Googlers in attendance.