Facebook joins NYU in artificial intelligence lab

AFP PHOTO / JOEL SAGET

Relaxnews | ctvnews.ca | AFP

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.

Facebook chief and co-founder Mark 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."

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