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Facebook is turning its attention to Canada with a new AI research office in Montreal. Google<\/a> and Microsoft<\/a> already have outposts in the city and countless other tech companies, including Uber<\/a>, have researchers based in Canada. McGill University\u2019s\u00a0Joelle Pineau will be leading Facebook\u2019s AI efforts in Montreal.<\/p>\n Pineau\u2019s research focus tends to lean heavily on robotics and dialog systems, particularly applications of reinforcement learning. Dialog research and natural language processing (NLP) more broadly is one of the core interests of Facebook\u2019s AI Research (FAIR) Lab<\/a> for obvious reasons \u2014 Facebook is home to a lot of text. And Facebook M<\/a>, its personal assistant, in particular relies heavily on dialog.<\/p>\n With uncertainty in the American immigration system, Canada is emerging as a center for research work. While the U.S. still leads the world in AI talent, some of the best researchers come from abroad. Canada\u2019s own schools like\u00a0Waterloo and McGill (to name a few) are AI research centers and programs further abroad at schools like\u00a0Tsinghua and\u00a0Cambridge are exceedingly strong.<\/p>\n With there still being a shortage of AI talent, Facebook\u2019s office in Montreal will provide the company access to a secure pipeline of gifted researchers. While\u00a0Yann LeCun, head of Facebook AI Research, said that immigration policy didn\u2019t play into his team\u2019s decision to expand to Montreal, he did note the clear benefits of operating in the region.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of the reason for establishing ourselves here is taking advantage of this pool of talent,\u201d\u00a0LeCun noted in an interview. \u201cThis didn\u2019t factor into our decision, but immigration in Canada is more well organized than immigration into the U.S..\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook currently operates AI research centers in Paris, New York City and Menlo Park, employing about 105 researchers. The aim is to grow the Montreal group from its founding team of four to 30 or 40 FAIRly quickly.<\/p>\n As part of this announcement, Facebook is donating money to\u00a0McGill and the University of Montreal to support graduate students and help improve computational infrastructure. While working to hire a team for Facebook,\u00a0Pineau will be maintaining her academic position at\u00a0McGill.\u00a0If you\u2019re interested in reading some of Pineau\u2019s work, including some particularly interesting applications of machine learning to medical use cases, you can find the papers on the McGill site. <\/a><\/p>\n Canadian Prime Minister\u00a0Justin Trudeau will be speaking about Facebook\u2019s efforts in Montreal tomorrow morning at around 11am EST. The event will be live streamed here.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n