• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 2, 2015

Investing further in artificial intelligence, Facebook is officially opening a new research lab in Paris.

Like its existing AI teams in Menlo Park, New York and London, the Paris hub will be expected to tackle long-term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these systems.

“It’s our hope that this research 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,” Facebook’s research team explains in a new blog post.

Facebook chose Paris because France is recognized as a hotbed for AI research -- not to mention the home nation of Yann LeCun, the head of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) since late 2013.

A professor at New York University, LeCun is one of the world’s leading figures on deep learning and machine learning. He has been doing pioneering work in AI since the 1980s.

Facebook’s AI efforts follow steps by other Web giants like Google and Yahoo to harness deep learning to enhance their services. Futurist and AI expert Ray Kurzweil, for instance, joined Google in 2013 after Larry Page convinced him to explore concepts in his book “How To Create A Mind.”

Along with the new lab, Facebook said it hopes to work openly with and invest in the AI research community in France, and the European Union. To that end, the company already has a collaborative agreement in place with INRIA, a top research institute in Paris.