Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is more usually associated with social networking, but the company has its fingers in plenty of other pies as well -- including Internet.org. Now the company is expanding its Facebook AI Research (FAIR) program to help with the automatic sorting and analysis of pictures, videos, text, and other data.
Facebook already has research teams looking into artificial intelligence in Menlo Park and New York, and the expansion sees the creation of a new team in Paris. The aim is create system that make it easier to manage the ever-growing quantities of data that are generated day in, day out by Facebook users.
Expanding into Europe is an interesting move for Facebook, which says that it intends to taps into the wealth of research expertise that exists in France. The company has a mutually beneficial arrangement with the French research institute INRIA; as well as setting up study opportunities for researchers and students, there is collaboration on Facebook's own AI programs
Speaking about the new team, Facebook said:
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.
It may be some time before the fruits of the research are seen, but work is now well under way to design and build the infrastructures for image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition projects.
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