Facebook is set to collaborate with New York University (NYU) to build a new centre for artificial intelligence, utilising the social network’s massive amount of data.
NYU’s Center for Data Science professor Yann LeCun will head the project, which involves building a team across three sites including New York, London and Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California.
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said: "As one of the most respected thinkers in this field, Yann has done groundbreaking research in deep learning and computer vision."
The new intelligence centre will work on "machine learning", which is a branch of artificial intelligence involving computers ‘learning’ to mine knowledge from massive datasets.
Earlier, Facebook chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed that a working group had been formed in September to carry out artificial intelligence research, making use of all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook.
The new project would also involve implementing new approaches in application interfaces to help make sense of all the content that users share on the social networking site, so that the centre could help generate new insights about the world to answer people’s queries.
Facebook is also aiming to build much more natural services to assist in solving more issues than currently available technology is able to.
