Facebook joins NYU in artificial intelligence lab
By Rob Lever (AFP) – 8 hours ago
Washington — Facebook unveiled plans Monday on a
partnership with New York University for a new center for artificial
intelligence, aimed at harnessing the huge social network's massive trove of
data.
The California-based tech giant named professor Yann
LeCun of NYU's Center for Data Science to head up the project.
Facebook, the world's biggest social network with more
than a billion members, is building the team across three locations -- New
York, London and its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
The lab will work on "machine learning," -- a
branch of artificial intelligence that involves computers "learning"
to extract knowledge from giant data sets.
LeCun, a French-born mathematician and computer
scientist, said in a blog post that he was pleased to head up the project with
"the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in
artificial intelligence."
"I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the
position of director of this new lab," LeCun wrote. "I will remain a
professor at New York University on a part-time basis, and will maintain
research and teaching activities at NYU."
Facebook chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke of the
plans during a call in October to discuss the company's quarterly earnings.
Zuckerberg said a working group was formed in September
"to do world-class artificial intelligence research using all of the
knowledge that people have shared on Facebook."
"The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to
help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new
insights about the world to answer people?s questions," Zuckerberg said at
the time.
He added that one of the goals was "to build services
that are much more natural to interact with and can help solve many more
problems than any existing technology today."
LeCun is a professor at NYU?s Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences and is the founding director of the university's Center
for Data Science.
He is known for creating an early version of a
pattern-recognition algorithm which mimics, in part, the visual cortex of
animals and humans.
The algorithm helped allow AT&T's Bell Labs to deploy
a check-reading system that by the late 1990s was reading about 20 percent of
all the checks written in the US, according to NYU.
LeCun's recent research projects include the application
of "deep learning" methods for visual scene understanding and
navigation autonomous ground robots, driverless cars, and small flying robots,
as well as speech recognition, and applications in biology and medicine.
LeCun is set to start the job in January.
Facebook joins other Internet firms like Google and
Microsoft in researching artificial intelligence, which could help in
delivering improved search results and in new products ranging from video games
to driverless vehicles.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved.
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