Facebook AI Research expands by collaborating with new academics for research

Facebook's Artificial Intelligence research was launched four years ago to focus on the science and technology of AI by frequently investing in academia and collaborating with academic communities. It is now expanding further with new academic collaborations in Pittsburgh, Seattle, London and Menlo Park.Facebook says that this dual affiliation model is common at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and most researchers from around the world work by splitting their time between FAIR and a university job.FAIR announced four new additions on 17 July, to help build new AI-specific labs.[caption id="attachment_4492429" align="alignnone" width="1280"]

A man waits for an elevator in front of a Facebook logo. Image: Reuters[/caption]The first collaboration is in Pittsburgh with Jessica Hudgins from Carnegie Mellon University, who will focus on robotics. Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation, and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion. She will also work at the Facebook Reality Lab in Pittsburgh. Abhinav Gupta, also from Carnegie Mellon will join her and will focus on large-scale visual and robot learning, self-supervised learning, and reasoning. They will retain their Carnegie Mellon University positions part-time.The second collaboration is in Seattle, with Luke Zettlemoyer who is an associate professor at Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He will focus on computational semantics, including deep learning methods for multilingual language understanding.Next, the third collaboration is in London, with Andrea Vedaldi, who is the associate professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford. He will be researching image understanding, specifically on unsupervised learning through large and diverse visual datasets and by understanding the geometric 3D reasoning. Bloomsbury AI team will also join FAIR in London.The final collaboration is in Melno Park, California with Jitendra Malik, from UC Berkely.Apart from this, Facebook claims that they plan to support a number of PhD students so that they can conduct research in collaboration with researchers at FAIR and their university faculty. They also state that they provide millions in funding to the schools from which they have hired.