Facebook Dabbles On Artificial Intelligence Research in New Paris Lab

Facebook has built a new program for over a year, the Facebook AI Research. Facebook has FAIR teams in Menlo Park and New York, and is now extending these research efforts to Paris.

In its newsroom, Facebook annouced that it chose Paris as its next destination for a new FAIR team. The company believes that "Paris is the home to some of the best researchers in the world." 

Besides collaborating with a France-based research team, Facebook is planning to work openly with and invest in the whole of EU and beyond. Facebook already has a deal with the French research Institute, Inria, to "open up new joint study opportunities for talented research professionals, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers."

Facebook is hoping this new research team will ultimately help in making services like News Feed, photos and search even better and enable an entirely new set of ways for users to connect and share.

Artificial intelligence work takes critical skills. This is why it makes sense for Facebook to open up branches in some global places, allowing bright researchers to join their AI projects. 

Facebook was able to catch the attention of Yann LeCunn, Professor at the New York University. Yann LeCun, who was born in Paris, informed Wired.com on tapping the research talent in Europe. LeCun and a group of researchers have been working on "deep learning" for years. With this, they have been building hardware for computers described as "the network of neurons in the brain," since 1980's. Facebook, Google and Microsoft adapted these "neural nets" to manage critical activities such as voice and image recognition to language translation. 

"Like the existing FAIR teams in Menlo Park and New York, the Paris team will work on ambitious long-term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these AI systems. It's our hope that this research will ultimately help us make services like News Feed, photos, and search even better and enable an entirely new set of ways to connect and share." LeCun wrote.

Facebook is known for investing huge amounts of resources on research activities. Facebook had already devoted nearly $3.54 billion on research and development. The efforts are bearing fruit. According to eMarketer, Facebook has more users in Europe than in the United States.

In addition, Facebook has now more than 1.4 billion users depending on their messaging applications and photo-sharing apps. For the current project, the company is more than willing to devote time and effort. "We're excited to see where this work takes us and what it will allow us to build for the people we serve." the company shared.