Facebook names NYU scientist to lead centre for artificial intelligence

Facebook has unveiled plans for a partnership with New York University to create a new centre for artificial intelligence, aimed at harnessing the huge social network's massive trove of data.

The California-based tech giant has named Professor Yann LeCun of NYU's Centre for Data Science to head up the project.

"As one of the most respected thinkers in this field, Yann has done groundbreaking research in deep learning and computer vision," Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, said.

Facebook is building the team across three locations - New York, London and its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

The lab will work on "machine learning", a branch of artificial intelligence that involves computers "learning" to extract knowledge from giant data sets.

LeCun, a French-born mathematician and computer scientist, said he was pleased to head up the project with "the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in artificial intelligence".