Facebook plants AI research team in Paris ZDNet

Facebook is offering some more hints at its virtual reality and artificial intelligence ambitions with the grand opening of a new office in Paris dedicated to AI innovation. The program, dubbed Facebook AI Research (FAIR), will be tasked with long-term research projects on image recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition. In line with Facebook's method of homegrown infrastructure, the AI team will also be responsible for building out the back-end pipelines for funneling all of that data. The end goal is to produce new channels for displaying Facebook's core features: News Feed, search and photos. To get started, Facebook signed a collaborative agreement with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (abbreviated in French to "INRIA").