Facebook Launches Artificial Research Lab In Montreal

Artificial intelligence is a growing field for tech companies and Facebook is the latest to make a significant investment in the platform. The social networking platform recently announced that it will launch a lab in Montreal dedicated to AI research.

In a post, Facebook said the team will be part of its Facebook AI Research project and will work alongside more than 100 scientists in California, New York and Paris to develop and work on AI research projects. Along with its general AI research, Facebook said its Montreal lab will specifically focus on reinforcement learning and dialog systems and it will also invest $7 million in Montreal’s AI and academic research.

Facebook also detailed its other plans for the satellite lab:

We are excited the new lab will be led by renowned Professor Joelle Pineau, who co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University. Dr. Pineau’s previous research has focused on developing new algorithms for planning and learning and then applying them to complex problems in robotics, health care, games, and conversational agents. Dr. Pineau will maintain her academic position at McGill University, in addition to building the FAIR Montreal team. We think the talent we can attract will bring valuable expertise and new perspectives to our work, and under Dr. Pineau’s leadership, we will continue to invest in this team and in the Canadian research community as a whole.

As we’ve done at other FAIR sites, FAIR Montreal will engage with the broader research community through publications, open source software, participation in technical conferences and workshops, and research collaborations. We are also launching new partnerships with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), McGill University, and Université de Montréal.

Notably among AI development, the branch is Facebook’s first research investment in Canada. While AI is a recent growth field among U.S. tech companies, Canadian universities like McGill University and startups have an established presence in AI research.

Earlier this year, Canadian AI startup Element AI — which was co-founded by Université de Montréal professor and noted machine learning researcher Yoshua Bengio — received $102 million in venture funding. In March, the Canadian government also announced that it would invest $125 million to fund AI research and development within the country. U.S. tech companies have moved to gain a foothold in the Canadian AI development space, as Uber, Google and Microsoft have been among those who’ve launched outposts in Canada dedicated to AI research.

For Facebook, the company has made AI a major part of its consumer efforts, as its Facebook M virtual assistant processes and reacts to user behavior. The company has made similarly significant projects in the AI research space, with efforts that have focused on automated detection of potential terrorism threats and AI bots that accidentally developed their own language.