Facebook is expanding its AI team to Montreal, according to a report today by the Wall Street Journal. The move will allow the social networking giant to tap into a hotbed of AI talent in and around the city.
Joelle Pineau, the co-director of McGill University’s Reasoning and Learning Lab, and the incoming president of the International Machine Learning Society, will lead the lab, according to a report from The Globe and Mail. She’ll be joined by Pascal Vincent, an associate professor at the University of Montreal.
Cutting edge AI talent is hard to come by, and Montreal is home to researchers who are working on some of the latest techniques in deep learning. The city is home to the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), a machine learning lab headed by Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers in the field.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is slated to speak tomorrow morning at an event in Montreal hosted by Facebook AI Research, according to an itinerary posted by his press office today. The topic of those remarks as well as the purpose of the event are both unclear.
Facebook is far from the only tech giant opening up shop in Montreal. Google already has an office in the city focused on machine learning, and Microsoft recently acquired a Montreal-based startup that specializes in deep learning called Maluuba.
Element AI, which raised a whopping $ 102 million earlier this year to build a business that helps other organizations implement and deploy artificial intelligence, is headquartered in the city and has garnered investment from Microsoft Ventures, Intel Capital and others.
Facebook already has a presence in Montreal, with a sales office that was created to work with Quebec residents. The company has two other offices in Canada, with one in Toronto and one in Vancouver.
A representative for Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pineau and Vincent were unavailable for comment at press time.
