Facebook focuses on robotics to attract AI scientists



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Facebook Inc. will be hiring five renowned IT experts in the US and Europe, adding new facilities to strengthen its artificial intelligence research division and focusing on robotics and related technologies.

The company is competing with other major companies Technology companies have decided to increase the limits of artificial intelligence and apply these advances to their products. They announced that they would hire researchers in Menlo Park, California, where it has its headquarters, as well as in Pittsburgh, Seattle and London.

Facebook's AI Research (FAIR) will hire Jessica Hodgins and Abhinav Gupta, who are currently professors at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, to head a new lab in the city that will focus on the robotics.

Facebook has not been at the forefront of robotic research. However, Yann LeCun, chief scientist of the IA at Facebook, said having a robotics program was essential to recruit the most promising young scientists and engineers to join Facebook. "We can not attract other researchers without doing research in this area," he said.

Facebook researchers have recently created a program designed for AI to find objects in their home. This year, the technology company has also patented a robot that swings itself. LeCun said Facebook currently uses robots that help maintain some of its data centers.

Facebook's most pressing challenge is to use the AI ​​to handle the large amount of content on its platforms. While many technology companies, including Alphabet Inc., Twitter Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Salesforce.com Inc., strive to make machines understand language better, improvements in this area are considered particularly important. for Facebook, where the proliferation of false news and extremist propaganda in his social network has provoked a popular and governmental reaction against him.

Mark Zuckerberg, the most senior company executive, told the US Congress that, in the long run, artificial intelligence should help control this content, but the current ability of the machines to understand the natural language – and its context – is currently very limited.

The company says it hired Luke Zettlemoyer, expert in natural language processing. from the University of Washington, to join his IA research team in Seattle. He also said he recruited two researchers in artificial vision: Jitendra Malik, a well-known scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, who joined Facebook to conduct his AI research initiatives at Menlo Park; and Andrea Vedaldi, associate professor at Oxford University, who will join the Facebook AI research team in London

LeCun said that Vedaldi would be part of the group. a group of researchers working on natural language processing that Facebook acquired last month by buying its London start-up Bloomsbury AI. The London and Pittsburgh offices join the five existing FAIR labs in Menlo Park, New York, Seattle, Montreal and Paris.

The intensity of the war for AI talent has helped raise the salaries of the best researchers to record levels: some of the best-known academics have been able to secure multi-million contracts dollars for several years. In some cases, technology companies were transferred to full university departments, as when Uber hired 50 researchers in 2015, a third of the workforce, from Carnegie Mellon University's robotic laboratory in Pittsburgh. .

LeCun said that working on robotics was important to explore ways to make machine learning more efficient and work better for real-world applications. "We would like to discover how to train machines without having to interact with humans for thousands of hours," he said. "We believe that complex robotics research will lead to advances there."

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