Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) established a new research laboratory with a long-term objective to accomplish major innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to Yann LeCun, professor at New York University who was hired by the social network giant to head its effort in the field.
In a blog post, LeCun said he will serve as director of the new Artificial Intelligence research laboratory and will continue teaching at the New York University as a part-time professor. He will also continue his research activities at the university.
According to him, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and New York University’s Center for Data Science signed a partnership agreement to conduct research in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The social network giant will have three AI Groups located in California, New York City, and United Kingdom.
LeCun added that the social network giant is hiring new staff for its new AI research laboratory. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and CTO Michael Schroepfer together with LeCun attended the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference at Lake Tahoe on Monday. During the conference, Zuckerberg will talk about the company’s plans on artificial intelligence.
During the previous earnings call of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Zuckerberg emphasized that the goal of the company is to “use new approaches in AI to help make sense” of the contents shared by people to generate new perspectives about the world to provide answers to inquiries.
In fact, the social network giant started forming its AI group back in September. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) also acquired Mobile Technologies, a speech recognition and machine translation company. The social network giant aims to use the company to expand its work beyond photo recognition to voice.
“Over time, I think it’s going to be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with and can help solve many more problems than any existing technology today. I’m excited that we’re working on this problem and I’m looking forward to us doing a lot more here,” according to Zuckerberg referring to Facebook’s initiative in AI during the recent earnings call.