Facebook Enters AI Research Arena
Facebook has hired New York University professor Yann LeCun to head up its research in Artificial Intelligence.
The move marks both a formal launch and expansion to AI research efforts by Facebook that have been underway for some time.
Professor LeCun in posting news about his new position said the goal of the research would be to bring about major advances in AI through a partnership with New York University, where LeCun will continue to maintain part time status.
Facebook’s combination launch/expansion follows a similar move by Google, which hired AI research scientist Ray Kurzweil last year. Kurzweil will lead Google’s efforts in both artificial intelligence and deep learning.
IBM, of course, has a long history of involvement in AI research, going back to the 1950s. More recently the company made news with its super computer, Watson, which successfully competed on the television show Jeopardy and is now well on the way to being available to the public as a resource for app providers.
All this led to an arms race between Google, Facebook and other tech companies that will desperately try to keep up.
At the heart of all this AI research is something called “deep learning.” Deep learning is an algorithm that allows computers to interpret the meaning as well as the context of both symbols and images.
Properly applied, deep learning would allow an application to recognize topics in which you are interested, then gather up posts and images on those topics and present them to you as part of your news feed.
While artificial intelligence research has been around for a long time, most of the work has been done in universities and government. The advent of companies such as Facebook and Google has made the application of AI viable for commercial purposes.
