Every day, the world generates more and more information — text, pictures, videos and more. To be useful, Facebook’s apps and services need to help you sort through all this information so you can better understand the world around you and more effectively communicate with the people who are important to you. For a little more than a year we’ve been building a program — Facebook AI Research (FAIR) — with this goal in mind.
Today we announced that we’re expanding those efforts with a new AI research team in Paris. Like the existing FAIR teams in Menlo Park and New York, 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.
We chose Paris for this expansion because France is home to some of the best researchers in the world. We think the FAIR Paris team will bring valuable expertise and new perspectives to our work, and we plan to work openly with and invest in the AI research community in France, the EU, and beyond as we strive to make meaningful progress in these fields. We have a collaborative agreement in place with INRIA, a leading research institute in Paris which opens up new joint study opportunities for talented research professionals, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers. We believe this open model ultimately spurs more innovation, encourages collaboration and mutual review, and helps us all move faster.
Our work in AI research is still relatively early. But we’ve built a terrific team and have already made some encouraging progress, and we’re excited to see where this work takes us and what it will allow us to build for the people we serve.