Facebook announces new research centre in Paris

Online social networking service Facebook on Tuesday announced opening of a new artificial intelligence research centre in Paris.

The US-headquartered internet giant said it had been building a programme - Facebook AI Research (FAIR) - to help users "sort through" ever increasing information generated online through "text, pictures, videos and more".

"Like the existing FAIR teams in Menlo Park and New York, the Paris team will work on ambitious long term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these AI [artificial intelligence] systems," a company release said.

Facebook hopes the research team "will ultimately help us make services like News Feed, photos and search even better and enable an entirely new set of ways to connect and share".

The company said that Paris was preferred for the research facility because it believed that France is home to some of the best researchers in the world.

"We have a collaborative agreement in place with INRIA, a leading research institute in Paris which opens up new joint study opportunities for talented research professionals, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers," it said.