Facebook's New Lab Bolsters Montreal's Bragging Rights As An AI Hub

On Friday, the social networking giant is announcing the opening of a new AI research lab, its fourth, in the Canadian city. Led by Joelle Pineau, an expert in the areas of dialogue systems and reinforcement learning, and a professor at McGill University in Montreal, the lab is expected to grow from an initial team of 10–including interns–to about 30 within a couple of years. Among those behind Montreal's emergence as a leader in AI research is University of Montreal professor and director of the school's Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in deep learning. "Facebook is clearly a leader in AI," Bengio said in a statement, "and the creation [of] Facebook's AI lab here is going to contribute to the expansion of Montreal as an international hub for AI, an ecosystem joining universities [and] established companies as well as startups." Pineau, who plans on maintaining her affiliation with McGill–and who will split her time evenly between the university and Facebook–said her team's mandate is to develop the next generation of artificial intelligence technology, particularly in the areas of computer vision, natural language, and video analysis.