Facebook Inc has hired artificial intelligence academic Joelle Pineau to head its new research lab in Montreal, the Silicon Valley social media company said on Friday. Once the exclusive domain of academic researchers, artificial intelligence has grabbed the attention of the corporate world as businesses from healthcare to financial services look to use algorithms to sort through reams of data in search of patterns to solve problems. The lab will be Facebook's fourth, after sites in Palo Alto, New York, and Paris, and joins similar AI research efforts in the city from Microsoft Corp and Alphabet's Google. Facebook Inc has hired artificial intelligence academic Joelle Pineau to head its new research lab in Montreal, the Silicon Valley social media company said on Friday. The company will also invest $7 million to support AI research at academic institutions in Montreal, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research said in a statement.

Royal Bank of Canada is hiring a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) as an adviser to a new research lab the bank is establishing as part of its investment in AI and machine learning, Canada's largest bank said on Wednesday. The bank declined to say how much is being invested, but estimated that its ongoing investments in AI will total in the tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. RBC Research said it is looking into how AI can be applied in banking and it will be working with Richard Sutton, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta. Sutton has made substantial contributions in the field of "reinforcement learning," a type of machine learning that uses reward and punishment. It is a subset of the science of getting a computer to do something without programming it to do so, and is the technology behind self-driving cars and underpins Google's AlphaGo, the AI program that last year beat the world champion at the ancient board game Go.

The new team has a distinct goal: to invent the future of Search, a voice-activated, human-like entity that can answer any query intelligently. "We are building the ultimate assistant. In two years, you can expect Google to become a personal life assistant across multiple surfaces, including your phone, Google Home, even cars," Mogenet said. Some of Google's best-known products are already shaped by machine learning, the ability of computers to spot patterns in large datasets and learn by example. For instance, Google Photos uses it to understand the content of an image.