Facebook has announced that it is opening an artificial intelligence research facility in Paris, France. Many of the world’s leading AI researchers, including Yann LeCun, the director of Facebook’s artificial-intelligence research efforts, are French or have studied at French universities, so observers say the new office could help the social network recruit top talent.
Facebook AI Research, or FAIR, will be focusing on using AI for to help analyze and process Facebook’s big data. “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,” LeCun said. “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.”